What does “significant involvement” mean here? I worked for CFAR full-time during that period and to the best of my knowledge you did not work there—I believe for some of that time you were dating someone who worked there, is that what you mean by significant involvement?
I remember being a “guest instructor” at one workshop, and talking about curriculum design with Anna and Kenzi. I was also at a lot of official and unofficial CFAR retreats/workshops/etc. I don’t think I participated in much of the normal/official CFAR process, though I did attend the “train the trainers workshop”, and in this range of contexts saw some of how decisions were made, how workshops were run, how people related to each other at parties.
As I recall it, what I observed first-hand and was told second-hand at the time confirms bullets 2, 4, and 6 of the top-level comment. Many of the others are about how people felt, and are consistent with what people I knew reported at the time. Nothing in the top-level comment seems dissonant with what I observed.
It seems like there was a lot of fragmentation (which is why we mostly didn’t interact). I felt bad about exercising (a small amount of) unaccountable influence at the time through these mechanisms, but I was confused about so much relative to the rate at which I was willing to ask questions that I didn’t end up asking about the info-siloing. In hindsight it seems intended to keep the true nature of governance obscure and therefore unaccountable. I did see or at least hear reports of Anna pretending to give different people authority over things and then intervening if they weren’t doing the thing she expected, which is consistent with that hypothesis.
I’m afraid I don’t remember a lot of details beyond this, I had a lot going on that year aside from CFAR.
My comment initially said 2014-2016 but IIRC my involvement was much less after 2015 so I edited it.
Unfortunately I think the working relationship between Anna and Kenzi was exceptionally bad in some ways and I would definitely believe that someone who mostly observed that would assume the organization had some of these problems; however I think this was also a relatively unique situation within the organization.
(I suspect though am not certain that both Anna and Kenzi would affirm that indeed this was an especially bad dynamic.)
With respect to point 2, I do not believe there was major peer pressure at CFAR to use psychadelics and I have never used psychadelics myself. It’s possible that there was major peer pressure on other people or it applied to me but I was oblivious to it or whatever but I’d be surprised.
Psychadelic use was also one of a few things that were heavily discouraged (or maybe banned?) as conversation topics for staff at workshops—like polyphasic sleep (another heavily discouraged topic), psychadelics were I believe viewed as potentially destabilizing and inappropriate to recommend to participants, plus there are legal issues involved. I personally consider recreational use of psychadelics to be immoral as well.
My comment initially said 2014-2016 but IIRC my involvement was much less after 2015 so I edited it.
Thanks for the clarification, I’ve edited mine too.
What do you see as the main sorts of interventions CFAR was organized around? I feel like this is a “different worlds” thing where I ought to be pretty curious what the whole scene looked like to you, what it seemed like people were up to, what the important activities were, & where progress was being made (or attempted).
I think that CFAR, at least while I was there full-time from 2014 to sometime in 2016, was heavily focused on running workshops or other programs (like the alumni reunions or the MIRI Summer Fellows program). See for instance my comment here.
Most of what the organization was doing seemed to involve planning and executing workshops or other programs and teaching the existing curriculum. There were some developments and advancements to the curriculum, but they often came from the workshops or something around them (like followups) rather than a systematic development project. For example, Kenzi once took on the lion’s share of workshop followups for a time, which led to her coming up with new curriculum based on her sense of what the followup participants were missing even after having attended the workshop.
(In the time before I joined there had been significantly more testing of curriculum etc. outside of workshops, but this seemed to have become less the thing by the time I was there.)
A lot of CFAR’s internal focus was on improving operations capacity. There was at one time a narrative that the staff was currently unable to do some of the longer-term development because too much time was spent on last minute scrambles to execute programs, but once operations sufficiently improved, we’d have much more open time to allocate to longer-term development.
I was skeptical of this and I think ultimately vindicated—CFAR made major improvements to its operations, but this did not lead to systematic research and development emerging, though it did allow for running more programs and doing so more smoothly.
What does “significant involvement” mean here? I worked for CFAR full-time during that period and to the best of my knowledge you did not work there—I believe for some of that time you were dating someone who worked there, is that what you mean by significant involvement?
I remember being a “guest instructor” at one workshop, and talking about curriculum design with Anna and Kenzi. I was also at a lot of official and unofficial CFAR retreats/workshops/etc. I don’t think I participated in much of the normal/official CFAR process, though I did attend the “train the trainers workshop”, and in this range of contexts saw some of how decisions were made, how workshops were run, how people related to each other at parties.
As I recall it, what I observed first-hand and was told second-hand at the time confirms bullets 2, 4, and 6 of the top-level comment. Many of the others are about how people felt, and are consistent with what people I knew reported at the time. Nothing in the top-level comment seems dissonant with what I observed.
It seems like there was a lot of fragmentation (which is why we mostly didn’t interact). I felt bad about exercising (a small amount of) unaccountable influence at the time through these mechanisms, but I was confused about so much relative to the rate at which I was willing to ask questions that I didn’t end up asking about the info-siloing. In hindsight it seems intended to keep the true nature of governance obscure and therefore unaccountable. I did see or at least hear reports of Anna pretending to give different people authority over things and then intervening if they weren’t doing the thing she expected, which is consistent with that hypothesis.
I’m afraid I don’t remember a lot of details beyond this, I had a lot going on that year aside from CFAR.
My comment initially said 2014-2016 but IIRC my involvement was much less after 2015 so I edited it.
I would like a lot more elaboration about this, if you can give it.
Can you say more specifically what you observed?
Unfortunately I think the working relationship between Anna and Kenzi was exceptionally bad in some ways and I would definitely believe that someone who mostly observed that would assume the organization had some of these problems; however I think this was also a relatively unique situation within the organization.
(I suspect though am not certain that both Anna and Kenzi would affirm that indeed this was an especially bad dynamic.)
With respect to point 2, I do not believe there was major peer pressure at CFAR to use psychadelics and I have never used psychadelics myself. It’s possible that there was major peer pressure on other people or it applied to me but I was oblivious to it or whatever but I’d be surprised.
Psychadelic use was also one of a few things that were heavily discouraged (or maybe banned?) as conversation topics for staff at workshops—like polyphasic sleep (another heavily discouraged topic), psychadelics were I believe viewed as potentially destabilizing and inappropriate to recommend to participants, plus there are legal issues involved. I personally consider recreational use of psychadelics to be immoral as well.
Thanks for the clarification, I’ve edited mine too.
What do you see as the main sorts of interventions CFAR was organized around? I feel like this is a “different worlds” thing where I ought to be pretty curious what the whole scene looked like to you, what it seemed like people were up to, what the important activities were, & where progress was being made (or attempted).
I think that CFAR, at least while I was there full-time from 2014 to sometime in 2016, was heavily focused on running workshops or other programs (like the alumni reunions or the MIRI Summer Fellows program). See for instance my comment here.
Most of what the organization was doing seemed to involve planning and executing workshops or other programs and teaching the existing curriculum. There were some developments and advancements to the curriculum, but they often came from the workshops or something around them (like followups) rather than a systematic development project. For example, Kenzi once took on the lion’s share of workshop followups for a time, which led to her coming up with new curriculum based on her sense of what the followup participants were missing even after having attended the workshop.
(In the time before I joined there had been significantly more testing of curriculum etc. outside of workshops, but this seemed to have become less the thing by the time I was there.)
A lot of CFAR’s internal focus was on improving operations capacity. There was at one time a narrative that the staff was currently unable to do some of the longer-term development because too much time was spent on last minute scrambles to execute programs, but once operations sufficiently improved, we’d have much more open time to allocate to longer-term development.
I was skeptical of this and I think ultimately vindicated—CFAR made major improvements to its operations, but this did not lead to systematic research and development emerging, though it did allow for running more programs and doing so more smoothly.