What are your thoughts on Duncan Sabien’s Facebook post which predicts significant differences in CFAR’s direction now that he is no longer working for CFAR?
My rough guess is “we survived; most of the differences I could imagine someone fearing didn’t come to pass”. My correction on that rough guess is: “Okay, but insofar as Duncan was the main holder of certain values, skills, and virtues, it seems pretty plausible that there are gaps now today that he would be able to see and that we haven’t seen”.
To be a bit more specific: some of the poles I noticed Duncan doing a lot to hold down while he was here were:
Institutional accountability and legibility;
Clear communication with staff; somebody caring about whether promises made were kept; somebody caring whether policies were fair and predictable, and whether the institution was creating a predictable context where staff, workshop participants, and others wouldn’t suddenly experience having the rug pulled out from under them;
Having the workshop classes start and end on time; (I’m a bit hesitant to name something this “small-seeming” here, but it is a concrete policy that supported the value above, and it is easier to track)
Revising the handbook into a polished state;
Having the workshop classes make sense to people, have clear diagrams and a clear point, etc.; having polish and visible narrative and clear expectations in the workshop;
AFAICT, these things are doing… alright in the absence of Duncan (due partly to the gradual accumulation of institutional knowledge), though I can see his departure in the organization. AFAICT also, Duncan gave me a good chunk of model of this stuff sometime after his Facebook post, actually—and worked pretty hard on a lot of this before his departure too. But I would not fully trust my own judgment on this one, because the outside view is that people (in this case, me) often fail to see what they cannot see.
When I get more concrete:
Institutional accountability and legibility is I think better than it was;
Clean communication with staff, keeping promises, creating clear expectations, etc. -- better on some axes and worse on others—my non-confident guess is better overall (via some loss plus lots of work);
Classes starting and ending on time—at mainlines: slightly less precise class-timing but not obviously worse thereby; at AIRCS, notable decreases, with some cost;
Handboook revisions—have done very little since he left;
Polish and narrative cohesion in the workshop classes—it’s less emphasized but not obviously worse thereby IMO, due partly to the infusion of the counterbalancing “original seeing” content from Brienne that was perhaps easier to pull off via toning polish down slightly. Cohesion and polish still seem acceptable, and far far better than before Duncan arrived.
Also: I don’t know how to phrase this tactfully in a large public conversation. But I appreciate Duncan’s efforts on behalf of CFAR; and also he left pretty burnt out; and also I want to respect what I view as his own attempt to disclaim responsibility for CFAR going forward (via that Facebook post) so that he won’t have to track whether he may have left misleading impressions of CFAR’s virtues in people. I don’t want our answers here to mess that up. If you come to CFAR and turn out not to like it, it is indeed not Duncan’s fault (even though it is still justly some credit to Duncan if you do, since we are still standing on the shoulders of his and many others’ past work).
On reading Anna’s above answer (which seems true to me, and also satisfies a lot of the curiosity I was experiencing, in a good way), I noted a feeling of something like “reading this, the median LWer will conclude that my contribution was primarily just ops-y and logistical, and the main thing that was at threat when I left was that the machine surrounding the intellectual work would get rusty.”
It seems worth noting that my model of CFAR (subject to disagreement from actual CFAR) is viewing that stuff as a domain of study, in and of itself—how groups cooperate and function, what makes up things like legibility and integrity, what sorts of worldview clashes are behind e.g. people who think it’s valuable to be on time and people who think punctuality is no big deal, etc.
But this is not necessarily something super salient in the median LWer’s model of CFAR, and so I imagine the median LWer thinking that Anna’s comment means my contributions weren’t intellectual or philosophical or relevant to ongoing rationality development, even though I think Anna-and-CFAR did indeed view me as contributing there, too (and thus the above is also saying something like “it turned out Duncan’s disappearance didn’t scuttle those threads of investigation”).
I agree very much with what Duncan says here. I forgot I need to point that kind of thing out explicitly. But a good bit of my soul-effort over the last year has gone into trying to inhabit the philosophical understanding of the world that can see as possibilities (and accomplish!) such things as integrity, legibility, accountability, and creating structures that work across time and across multiple people. IMO, Duncan had a lot to teach me and CFAR here; he is one of the core models I go to when I try to understand this, and my best guess is that it is in significant part his ability to understand and articulate this philosophical pole (as well as to do it himself) that enabled CFAR to move from the early-stage pile of un-transferrable “spaghetti code” that we were when he arrived, to an institution with organizational structure capable of e.g. hosting instructor trainings and taking in and making use of new staff.
Reading this I’m curious about what the actual CFAR position on punctuality was before and now. Was it something like the Landmark package under your tenure?
These are more like “thoughts sparked by Duncan’s post” rather than “thoughts on Duncan’s post”. Thinking about the question of how well you can predict what a workshop experience will be like if you’ve been at a workshop under different circumstances, and looking back over the years...
In terms of what it’s like to be at a mainline CFAR workshop, as a first approximation I’d say that it has been broadly similar since 2013. Obviously there have been a bunch of changes since January 2013 in terms of our curriculum, our level of experience, our staff, and so on, but if you’ve been to a mainline workshop since 2013 (and to some extent even before then), and you’ve also had a lifetime full of other experiences, your experience at that mainline workshop seems like a pretty good guide to what a workshop is like these days. And if you haven’t been to a workshop and are wondering what it’s like, then talking to people who have been to workshops since 2013 seems like a good way to learn about it.
More recent workshops are more similar to the current workshop than older ones. The most prominent cutoff that comes to mind for more vs. less similar workshops is the one I already mentioned (Jan 2013) which is the first time that we basically understood how to run a workshop. The next cutoff that comes to mind is January 2015, which is when the current workshop arc & structure clicked into place. The next is July 2019, which is the second workshop which was run by something like the current team and the first one where we hit our stride (it was also the first one after we started this year’s instructor training, which I think helped with hitting our stride). And after that is sometime in 2016 I think when the main classes reached something resembling their current form.
Besides recency, it’s also definitely true that the people at the workshop bring a different feel to it. European workshops have a different feel than US workshops because so many of the people there are from somewhat different cultures. Each staff member brings a different flavor—we try to have staff who approach things in different ways, partly in order to span more of the space of possible ways that it can look like to be engaging with this rationality stuff. The workshop MC (which was generally Duncan’s role while he was involved) does impart more of their flavor on the workshop than most people, although for a single participant their experience is probably shaped more by whichever people they wind up connecting with the most and that can vary a lot even between participants at the same workshop.
What I get from Duncan’s FB post is (1) an attempt to disentangle his reputation from CFAR’s after he leaves, (2) a prediction that things will change due to his departure, and (3) an expression of frustration that more of his knowledge than necessary will be lost.
It’s a totally reasonable choice.
At the time I first saw Duncan’s post I was more worried about big changes to our workshops from losing Duncan than I have observed since then. A year later I think the change is actually less than one would expect from reading Duncan’s post alone. That doesn’t speak to the cost of not having Duncan—since filling in for his absence means we have less attention to spend on other things, and I believe some things Duncan brought have not been replaced.
I am also sad about this, and believe that I was the person best positioned to have caused a better outcome (smaller loss of Duncan’s knowledge and values). In other words I think Duncan’s frustration is not only understandable, but also pointing at a true thing.
(I expect the answer to 2 will still be the same from your perspective, after reading this comment, but I just wanted to point out that not all influences of a CFAR staff member cash out in things-visible-in-the-workshop; the part of my FB post that you describe as 2 was about strategy and research and internal culture as much as workshop content and execution. I’m sort of sad that multiple answers have had a slant that implies “Duncan only mattered at workshops/Duncan leaving only threatened to negatively impact workshops.”)
To be honest I haven’t noticed much change, except obviously for the literal absence of Duncan (which is a very noticeable absence; among other things Duncan is an amazing teacher, imo better than anyone currently on staff).
What are your thoughts on Duncan Sabien’s Facebook post which predicts significant differences in CFAR’s direction now that he is no longer working for CFAR?
My rough guess is “we survived; most of the differences I could imagine someone fearing didn’t come to pass”. My correction on that rough guess is: “Okay, but insofar as Duncan was the main holder of certain values, skills, and virtues, it seems pretty plausible that there are gaps now today that he would be able to see and that we haven’t seen”.
To be a bit more specific: some of the poles I noticed Duncan doing a lot to hold down while he was here were:
Institutional accountability and legibility;
Clear communication with staff; somebody caring about whether promises made were kept; somebody caring whether policies were fair and predictable, and whether the institution was creating a predictable context where staff, workshop participants, and others wouldn’t suddenly experience having the rug pulled out from under them;
Having the workshop classes start and end on time; (I’m a bit hesitant to name something this “small-seeming” here, but it is a concrete policy that supported the value above, and it is easier to track)
Revising the handbook into a polished state;
Having the workshop classes make sense to people, have clear diagrams and a clear point, etc.; having polish and visible narrative and clear expectations in the workshop;
AFAICT, these things are doing… alright in the absence of Duncan (due partly to the gradual accumulation of institutional knowledge), though I can see his departure in the organization. AFAICT also, Duncan gave me a good chunk of model of this stuff sometime after his Facebook post, actually—and worked pretty hard on a lot of this before his departure too. But I would not fully trust my own judgment on this one, because the outside view is that people (in this case, me) often fail to see what they cannot see.
When I get more concrete:
Institutional accountability and legibility is I think better than it was;
Clean communication with staff, keeping promises, creating clear expectations, etc. -- better on some axes and worse on others—my non-confident guess is better overall (via some loss plus lots of work);
Classes starting and ending on time—at mainlines: slightly less precise class-timing but not obviously worse thereby; at AIRCS, notable decreases, with some cost;
Handboook revisions—have done very little since he left;
Polish and narrative cohesion in the workshop classes—it’s less emphasized but not obviously worse thereby IMO, due partly to the infusion of the counterbalancing “original seeing” content from Brienne that was perhaps easier to pull off via toning polish down slightly. Cohesion and polish still seem acceptable, and far far better than before Duncan arrived.
Also: I don’t know how to phrase this tactfully in a large public conversation. But I appreciate Duncan’s efforts on behalf of CFAR; and also he left pretty burnt out; and also I want to respect what I view as his own attempt to disclaim responsibility for CFAR going forward (via that Facebook post) so that he won’t have to track whether he may have left misleading impressions of CFAR’s virtues in people. I don’t want our answers here to mess that up. If you come to CFAR and turn out not to like it, it is indeed not Duncan’s fault (even though it is still justly some credit to Duncan if you do, since we are still standing on the shoulders of his and many others’ past work).
On reading Anna’s above answer (which seems true to me, and also satisfies a lot of the curiosity I was experiencing, in a good way), I noted a feeling of something like “reading this, the median LWer will conclude that my contribution was primarily just ops-y and logistical, and the main thing that was at threat when I left was that the machine surrounding the intellectual work would get rusty.”
It seems worth noting that my model of CFAR (subject to disagreement from actual CFAR) is viewing that stuff as a domain of study, in and of itself—how groups cooperate and function, what makes up things like legibility and integrity, what sorts of worldview clashes are behind e.g. people who think it’s valuable to be on time and people who think punctuality is no big deal, etc.
But this is not necessarily something super salient in the median LWer’s model of CFAR, and so I imagine the median LWer thinking that Anna’s comment means my contributions weren’t intellectual or philosophical or relevant to ongoing rationality development, even though I think Anna-and-CFAR did indeed view me as contributing there, too (and thus the above is also saying something like “it turned out Duncan’s disappearance didn’t scuttle those threads of investigation”).
I agree very much with what Duncan says here. I forgot I need to point that kind of thing out explicitly. But a good bit of my soul-effort over the last year has gone into trying to inhabit the philosophical understanding of the world that can see as possibilities (and accomplish!) such things as integrity, legibility, accountability, and creating structures that work across time and across multiple people. IMO, Duncan had a lot to teach me and CFAR here; he is one of the core models I go to when I try to understand this, and my best guess is that it is in significant part his ability to understand and articulate this philosophical pole (as well as to do it himself) that enabled CFAR to move from the early-stage pile of un-transferrable “spaghetti code” that we were when he arrived, to an institution with organizational structure capable of e.g. hosting instructor trainings and taking in and making use of new staff.
Reading this I’m curious about what the actual CFAR position on punctuality was before and now. Was it something like the Landmark package under your tenure?
(This is Dan, from CFAR since June 2012)
These are more like “thoughts sparked by Duncan’s post” rather than “thoughts on Duncan’s post”. Thinking about the question of how well you can predict what a workshop experience will be like if you’ve been at a workshop under different circumstances, and looking back over the years...
In terms of what it’s like to be at a mainline CFAR workshop, as a first approximation I’d say that it has been broadly similar since 2013. Obviously there have been a bunch of changes since January 2013 in terms of our curriculum, our level of experience, our staff, and so on, but if you’ve been to a mainline workshop since 2013 (and to some extent even before then), and you’ve also had a lifetime full of other experiences, your experience at that mainline workshop seems like a pretty good guide to what a workshop is like these days. And if you haven’t been to a workshop and are wondering what it’s like, then talking to people who have been to workshops since 2013 seems like a good way to learn about it.
More recent workshops are more similar to the current workshop than older ones. The most prominent cutoff that comes to mind for more vs. less similar workshops is the one I already mentioned (Jan 2013) which is the first time that we basically understood how to run a workshop. The next cutoff that comes to mind is January 2015, which is when the current workshop arc & structure clicked into place. The next is July 2019, which is the second workshop which was run by something like the current team and the first one where we hit our stride (it was also the first one after we started this year’s instructor training, which I think helped with hitting our stride). And after that is sometime in 2016 I think when the main classes reached something resembling their current form.
Besides recency, it’s also definitely true that the people at the workshop bring a different feel to it. European workshops have a different feel than US workshops because so many of the people there are from somewhat different cultures. Each staff member brings a different flavor—we try to have staff who approach things in different ways, partly in order to span more of the space of possible ways that it can look like to be engaging with this rationality stuff. The workshop MC (which was generally Duncan’s role while he was involved) does impart more of their flavor on the workshop than most people, although for a single participant their experience is probably shaped more by whichever people they wind up connecting with the most and that can vary a lot even between participants at the same workshop.
What I get from Duncan’s FB post is (1) an attempt to disentangle his reputation from CFAR’s after he leaves, (2) a prediction that things will change due to his departure, and (3) an expression of frustration that more of his knowledge than necessary will be lost.
It’s a totally reasonable choice.
At the time I first saw Duncan’s post I was more worried about big changes to our workshops from losing Duncan than I have observed since then. A year later I think the change is actually less than one would expect from reading Duncan’s post alone. That doesn’t speak to the cost of not having Duncan—since filling in for his absence means we have less attention to spend on other things, and I believe some things Duncan brought have not been replaced.
I am also sad about this, and believe that I was the person best positioned to have caused a better outcome (smaller loss of Duncan’s knowledge and values). In other words I think Duncan’s frustration is not only understandable, but also pointing at a true thing.
(I expect the answer to 2 will still be the same from your perspective, after reading this comment, but I just wanted to point out that not all influences of a CFAR staff member cash out in things-visible-in-the-workshop; the part of my FB post that you describe as 2 was about strategy and research and internal culture as much as workshop content and execution. I’m sort of sad that multiple answers have had a slant that implies “Duncan only mattered at workshops/Duncan leaving only threatened to negatively impact workshops.”)
I’d be curious for an answer to this one too, actually.
To be honest I haven’t noticed much change, except obviously for the literal absence of Duncan (which is a very noticeable absence; among other things Duncan is an amazing teacher, imo better than anyone currently on staff).