I wish we had. Unfortunately, I don’t think we did much in the way of pre-portems on our long-term goals, unless I’m forgetting something. (We discussed “what if CFAR doesn’t manage to become financially able to keep existing at all”, and “what if particular workshops can’t be made to work,” but those are shorter term.) Eliezer’s sequence “The craft and the community” was written before CFAR, but after he wanted an independent rationality community that included rationality training, so we could try to compare what happened against that.
Yeah, not clear what this particular scenario would have looked like then. “We succeed financially, we get good feedback from satisfied customers, but our rationality training doesn’t seem to make the alumni measurably more “rational”, and so we stop.”
I mean, at my very first CFAR workshop (2012, I think?), I was of the opinion “come on guys, it’s almost all selection effects, I’m here for the networking / actually meeting people off the internet”, and so to some extent that me wouldn’t have been that surprised. If anything, I think he would have been positively surprised that CFAR generated a handful of techniques that seem real to me, and also popularized some techniques that seem real to me that I’m not sure I would have otherwise come across (mostly Circling; Focusing I already would have come across from looking up the Litany of Gendlin, I think.).
Minor point: Yes, your workshop was May 2012. That was CFAR’s first workshop (what was then still called a “minicamp” due to CFAR’s spiritual predecessor).
I wonder if there was a pre-mortem on CFAR and if it matched the postmortem?
I wish we had. Unfortunately, I don’t think we did much in the way of pre-portems on our long-term goals, unless I’m forgetting something. (We discussed “what if CFAR doesn’t manage to become financially able to keep existing at all”, and “what if particular workshops can’t be made to work,” but those are shorter term.) Eliezer’s sequence “The craft and the community” was written before CFAR, but after he wanted an independent rationality community that included rationality training, so we could try to compare what happened against that.
Yeah, not clear what this particular scenario would have looked like then. “We succeed financially, we get good feedback from satisfied customers, but our rationality training doesn’t seem to make the alumni measurably more “rational”, and so we stop.”
I mean, at my very first CFAR workshop (2012, I think?), I was of the opinion “come on guys, it’s almost all selection effects, I’m here for the networking / actually meeting people off the internet”, and so to some extent that me wouldn’t have been that surprised. If anything, I think he would have been positively surprised that CFAR generated a handful of techniques that seem real to me, and also popularized some techniques that seem real to me that I’m not sure I would have otherwise come across (mostly Circling; Focusing I already would have come across from looking up the Litany of Gendlin, I think.).
Minor point: Yes, your workshop was May 2012. That was CFAR’s first workshop (what was then still called a “minicamp” due to CFAR’s spiritual predecessor).
I mean, that kind of is the idea in Eliezer’s post “Schools proliferating without evidence,” from two years before CFAR was founded.
(Minus the “so we stop” part.)