Historically, CFAR had the following concerns (I haven’t worked there since Oct 2018, so their thinking may have changed since then; if a current staff member gets around to answering this question you should consider their answer to trump this one):
The handbook material doesn’t actually “work” in the sense that it can change lives; the workshop experience is crucial to what limited success CFAR *is* able to have, and there’s concern about falsely offering hope
There is such a thing as idea inoculation; the handbook isn’t perfect and certainly can’t adjust itself to every individual person’s experience and cognitive style. If someone gets a weaker, broken, or uncanny-valley version of a rationality technique out of a book, not only may it fail to help them in any way, but it will also make subsequently learning [a real and useful skill that’s nearby in concept space] correspondingly more difficult, both via conscious dismissiveness and unconscious rounding-off.
To the extent that certain ideas or techniques only work in concert or as a gestalt, putting the document out on the broader internet where it will be chopped up and rearranged and quoted in chunks and riffed off of and likely misinterpreted, etc., might be worse than not putting it out at all.
Historically, CFAR had the following concerns (I haven’t worked there since Oct 2018, so their thinking may have changed since then; if a current staff member gets around to answering this question you should consider their answer to trump this one):
The handbook material doesn’t actually “work” in the sense that it can change lives; the workshop experience is crucial to what limited success CFAR *is* able to have, and there’s concern about falsely offering hope
There is such a thing as idea inoculation; the handbook isn’t perfect and certainly can’t adjust itself to every individual person’s experience and cognitive style. If someone gets a weaker, broken, or uncanny-valley version of a rationality technique out of a book, not only may it fail to help them in any way, but it will also make subsequently learning [a real and useful skill that’s nearby in concept space] correspondingly more difficult, both via conscious dismissiveness and unconscious rounding-off.
To the extent that certain ideas or techniques only work in concert or as a gestalt, putting the document out on the broader internet where it will be chopped up and rearranged and quoted in chunks and riffed off of and likely misinterpreted, etc., might be worse than not putting it out at all.