We hit some of our concrete goals for 2015, and pivoted away from others.
We created a metric for strategic usefulness, hitting the first goal; we started tracking that metric, hitting the second goal.
We chose to change focus from boosting alumni scores on these components, however. [...] Focusing on boosting those components no longer made sense, and we transitioned away from that target.
because it seems to me to amount to this: “Our goals for the year included putting in place metrics by which we could tell whether we were actually achieving what we want. So we did that. And then we decided we didn’t want to track those, so we threw them away again.”
… which is, to be sure, a reasonable course of action if you discover that you were measuring the wrong thing—but is also exactly what you’d see if CFAR had found (or guessed) that it wasn’t making progress according to those metrics, and didn’t want that fact to be too visible.
Combined with an apparent shift from “hold workshops that enhance people’s instrumental rationality” in the direction of “hold workshops that funnel people into MIRI”, and the discovery that real rationality apparently necessarily involves “deep caring” … I dunno, maybe it’s all absolutely fine, but it looks just a little too much like a transition from “rationality enhancer” to “cult recruitment vehicle”.
Sorry. Original phrasing around how we were now going to measure was pretty bad, I agree. I just edited it. I had been bothered by the very text you quoted, and we had an internal thread where we all discussed that and agreed that the phrases were wrong… but we were slow about that, and you commented while we were discussing! The new text more closely reflects the actual structure of how we’ve been thinking about it all.
It’s a bit tricky to publish a long post with many co-editors without letting something inaccurate through (at least in a sleep-deprived marathon like we very rationally used before publishing this one...; there were a bunch of us working collaboratively on the text...); but we should probably in fact have edited a bit more before posting; anyhow, my apologies for editing this text on you after you commented.
I find this bit quite alarming:
because it seems to me to amount to this: “Our goals for the year included putting in place metrics by which we could tell whether we were actually achieving what we want. So we did that. And then we decided we didn’t want to track those, so we threw them away again.”
… which is, to be sure, a reasonable course of action if you discover that you were measuring the wrong thing—but is also exactly what you’d see if CFAR had found (or guessed) that it wasn’t making progress according to those metrics, and didn’t want that fact to be too visible.
Combined with an apparent shift from “hold workshops that enhance people’s instrumental rationality” in the direction of “hold workshops that funnel people into MIRI”, and the discovery that real rationality apparently necessarily involves “deep caring” … I dunno, maybe it’s all absolutely fine, but it looks just a little too much like a transition from “rationality enhancer” to “cult recruitment vehicle”.
Sorry. Original phrasing around how we were now going to measure was pretty bad, I agree. I just edited it. I had been bothered by the very text you quoted, and we had an internal thread where we all discussed that and agreed that the phrases were wrong… but we were slow about that, and you commented while we were discussing! The new text more closely reflects the actual structure of how we’ve been thinking about it all.
It’s a bit tricky to publish a long post with many co-editors without letting something inaccurate through (at least in a sleep-deprived marathon like we very rationally used before publishing this one...; there were a bunch of us working collaboratively on the text...); but we should probably in fact have edited a bit more before posting; anyhow, my apologies for editing this text on you after you commented.