Does CFAR feel developed enough that it would prefer money to feedback?
I.E, I presume there are many people out there who could help CFAR either by dedicating a few hours of there time thinking about how to improve CFAR or earning money to donate to CFAR.
I think CFAR feels poor enough to prefer money to feedback.
Also they’ve tried a lot of the obvious things—I had a conversation with Anna where I suggested about 10 things for CFAR to try, they’d already tried about 9, and the 10th wasn’t obviously better than the stuff already on their list. Maybe you’re smarter than me, though :)
That preference seems mostly right to me… but I did just get quite a good suggestion by email that I hadn’t thought of. If you feel like you know important things, do share.
Having spent a fair amount of time around CFAR staff, in the office and out, I can testify to their almost unbelievable level of self-reflection and creativity. (I recall, several months ago, Julia joking about how much time in meetings was spent discussing the meetings themselves at various levels of meta.) For what it’s worth, I can’t think of an organization I’d trust to have a greater grasp on its own needs and resources. If they’re pushing fundraising, I’d estimate with high confidence that it’s because that’s where the bottleneck is.
I think donating x hours-worth of income is, with few exceptions, a better route than trying to donate x hours of personal time, especially when you consider that managing external volunteers/having discussions (a perhaps-unpredictable percentage of which will be unproductive) is itself more costly than accepting money.
I’d be willing to guess that the next best thing to donating money would be to pitch CFAR to/offer to set up introductions with high-leverage individuals who might be receptive, but only if that’s the sort of thing (you have evidence for believing) you’re good at.
Also, sharing information about the fundraising drive via email/Facebook/Twitter/etc. is probably worth the minimal time and effort.
Do you know why CFAR’s probability experiment reports have stopped after exactly one? Did they stop performing experiments? Were the results uninteresting and they decided not to write them up despite their claim that they would? I’d also love to see their underlying data for even the first experiment but no one’s sharing. Should I offer them money to release the data instead?
We did one more experiment and have another in the works. Second experiment will be written up, I think, but hasn’t been yet. I suspect we’d also love to share the data with you (and possibly more widely if there aren’t anonymization issues; I wasn’t closely involved in the experiments and don’t know if there are); I see your unanswered comment back in the thread; I suspect it’s just a matter of a small team of somewhat overbooked people dropping a thing.
I helped create CFAR, and work every day in the same office as they do, and I still need to talk with the co-founders for several hours before I understand enough detail about CFAR’s challenges and opportunities to have advice that I’m decently confident will be useful rather than something they’ve already tried, or something they have a good reason for not doing, etc.
Does CFAR feel developed enough that it would prefer money to feedback?
I.E, I presume there are many people out there who could help CFAR either by dedicating a few hours of there time thinking about how to improve CFAR or earning money to donate to CFAR.
I think CFAR feels poor enough to prefer money to feedback.
Also they’ve tried a lot of the obvious things—I had a conversation with Anna where I suggested about 10 things for CFAR to try, they’d already tried about 9, and the 10th wasn’t obviously better than the stuff already on their list. Maybe you’re smarter than me, though :)
That preference seems mostly right to me… but I did just get quite a good suggestion by email that I hadn’t thought of. If you feel like you know important things, do share.
Having spent a fair amount of time around CFAR staff, in the office and out, I can testify to their almost unbelievable level of self-reflection and creativity. (I recall, several months ago, Julia joking about how much time in meetings was spent discussing the meetings themselves at various levels of meta.) For what it’s worth, I can’t think of an organization I’d trust to have a greater grasp on its own needs and resources. If they’re pushing fundraising, I’d estimate with high confidence that it’s because that’s where the bottleneck is.
I think donating x hours-worth of income is, with few exceptions, a better route than trying to donate x hours of personal time, especially when you consider that managing external volunteers/having discussions (a perhaps-unpredictable percentage of which will be unproductive) is itself more costly than accepting money.
I’d be willing to guess that the next best thing to donating money would be to pitch CFAR to/offer to set up introductions with high-leverage individuals who might be receptive, but only if that’s the sort of thing (you have evidence for believing) you’re good at.
Also, sharing information about the fundraising drive via email/Facebook/Twitter/etc. is probably worth the minimal time and effort.
Do you know why CFAR’s probability experiment reports have stopped after exactly one? Did they stop performing experiments? Were the results uninteresting and they decided not to write them up despite their claim that they would? I’d also love to see their underlying data for even the first experiment but no one’s sharing. Should I offer them money to release the data instead?
We did one more experiment and have another in the works. Second experiment will be written up, I think, but hasn’t been yet. I suspect we’d also love to share the data with you (and possibly more widely if there aren’t anonymization issues; I wasn’t closely involved in the experiments and don’t know if there are); I see your unanswered comment back in the thread; I suspect it’s just a matter of a small team of somewhat overbooked people dropping a thing.
Thanks, that’s what I suspected too given no responses.
I helped create CFAR, and work every day in the same office as they do, and I still need to talk with the co-founders for several hours before I understand enough detail about CFAR’s challenges and opportunities to have advice that I’m decently confident will be useful rather than something they’ve already tried, or something they have a good reason for not doing, etc.