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.
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.