Working at CFAR (especially in the early years) was a pretty intense experience, which involved a workflow that regularly threw you into these immersive workshops, and also regularly digging deeply into your thinking and how your mind works and what you could do better, and also trying to make this fledgling organization survive & function. I think the basic thing that happened is that, even for people who were initially really excited about taking this on, things looked different for them a few years later. Part of that is personal, with things like burnout, or feeling like they’d gotten their fill and had learned a large chunk of what they could from this experience, or wanting a life full of experiences which were hard to fit in to this (probably these 3 things overlap). And part of it was professional, where they got excited about other projects for doing good in the world while CFAR wanted to stay pretty narrowly focused on rationality workshops.
I’m tempted to try to go into more detail, but it feels like that would require starting to talk about particular individuals rather the set of people who were involved in early CFAR and I feel weird about that.
(This is Dan, from CFAR since 2012)
Working at CFAR (especially in the early years) was a pretty intense experience, which involved a workflow that regularly threw you into these immersive workshops, and also regularly digging deeply into your thinking and how your mind works and what you could do better, and also trying to make this fledgling organization survive & function. I think the basic thing that happened is that, even for people who were initially really excited about taking this on, things looked different for them a few years later. Part of that is personal, with things like burnout, or feeling like they’d gotten their fill and had learned a large chunk of what they could from this experience, or wanting a life full of experiences which were hard to fit in to this (probably these 3 things overlap). And part of it was professional, where they got excited about other projects for doing good in the world while CFAR wanted to stay pretty narrowly focused on rationality workshops.
I’m tempted to try to go into more detail, but it feels like that would require starting to talk about particular individuals rather the set of people who were involved in early CFAR and I feel weird about that.