I worked for CFAR full-time from 2014 until mid-to-late 2016 and have continued working as a part-time employee or frequent contractor since. I’m sorry this was your experience. That said, it really does not mesh that much with what I’ve experienced and some of it is almost the opposite of the impressions that I got. Some brief examples:
My experience was that CFAR if anything should have used its techniques internally muchmore. Double crux for instance felt like it should have been used internally far more than it actually was—one thing that vexed me about CFAR was a sense that there were persistent unresolved major strategic disagreements between staff members that the organization did not seem to prioritize resolving, where I think double crux would have helped.
(I’m not talking about personal disagreements but rather things like “should X set of classes be in the workshop or not?”)
Similarly, goal factoring didn’t see much internal use (I again think it should have been used more!) and Leverage-style “charting” strikes me as really a very different thing from the way CFAR used this sort of stuff.
There was generally little internal “debugging” at all, which contrary to the previous two cases I think is mostly correct—the environment of having your colleagues “debug” you seems pretty weird and questionable. I do think there was at least some of this, but I don’t think it was pervasive or mandatory in the organization and I mostly avoided it.
Far from spending all my time with team members outside of work, I think I spent most of my leisure and social time with people from other groups, many outside the rationalist community. To some degree I (and I think some others) would have liked for the staff to be tighter-knit, but that wasn’t really the culture. Most CFAR staff members did not necessarily know much about my personal life and I did not know much about theirs.
I do not much venerate the founding team or consider them to be ultimate masters or whatever. There was a period early on when I was first working there where I sort of assumed everyone was more advanced than they actually were, but this faded with time. I think what you might consider “lionizing parables” I might consider “examples of people using the techniques in their own lives”. Here is a sample example of this type I’ve given many times at workshops as part of the TAPs class, the reader can decide whether it is a “lionizing parable” or not (note: exact wording may vary):
It can be useful to practice TAPs by actually physically practicing! I believe <a previous instructor’s name> once wanted to set up a TAP involving something they wanted to do after getting out of bed in the morning, so they actually turned off all the lights in their room, got into bed as if they were sleeping, set an alarm to go off as if it were the morning, then waited in bed for the alarm to go off, got up, did the action they were practicing… and then set the whole thing up again and repeated!
I’m very confused by what you deem “narrativemancy” here. I have encountered the term before but I don’t think it was intentionally taught as a CFAR technique or used internally as an explicit technique. IIRC the term also had at least somewhat negative valence.
I should clarify that I have been less involved in “day-to-day” CFAR stuff since mid-late 2016, though I have been at I believe a large majority of mainline workshops (I think I’m one of the most active instructors). It’s possible that the things you describe were occurring but in ways that I didn’t see. That said, they really don’t match with my picture of what working at CFAR was like.
I worked for CFAR full-time from 2014 until mid-to-late 2016 and have continued working as a part-time employee or frequent contractor since. I’m sorry this was your experience. That said, it really does not mesh that much with what I’ve experienced and some of it is almost the opposite of the impressions that I got. Some brief examples:
My experience was that CFAR if anything should have used its techniques internally much more. Double crux for instance felt like it should have been used internally far more than it actually was—one thing that vexed me about CFAR was a sense that there were persistent unresolved major strategic disagreements between staff members that the organization did not seem to prioritize resolving, where I think double crux would have helped.
(I’m not talking about personal disagreements but rather things like “should X set of classes be in the workshop or not?”)
Similarly, goal factoring didn’t see much internal use (I again think it should have been used more!) and Leverage-style “charting” strikes me as really a very different thing from the way CFAR used this sort of stuff.
There was generally little internal “debugging” at all, which contrary to the previous two cases I think is mostly correct—the environment of having your colleagues “debug” you seems pretty weird and questionable. I do think there was at least some of this, but I don’t think it was pervasive or mandatory in the organization and I mostly avoided it.
Far from spending all my time with team members outside of work, I think I spent most of my leisure and social time with people from other groups, many outside the rationalist community. To some degree I (and I think some others) would have liked for the staff to be tighter-knit, but that wasn’t really the culture. Most CFAR staff members did not necessarily know much about my personal life and I did not know much about theirs.
I do not much venerate the founding team or consider them to be ultimate masters or whatever. There was a period early on when I was first working there where I sort of assumed everyone was more advanced than they actually were, but this faded with time. I think what you might consider “lionizing parables” I might consider “examples of people using the techniques in their own lives”. Here is a sample example of this type I’ve given many times at workshops as part of the TAPs class, the reader can decide whether it is a “lionizing parable” or not (note: exact wording may vary):
It can be useful to practice TAPs by actually physically practicing! I believe <a previous instructor’s name> once wanted to set up a TAP involving something they wanted to do after getting out of bed in the morning, so they actually turned off all the lights in their room, got into bed as if they were sleeping, set an alarm to go off as if it were the morning, then waited in bed for the alarm to go off, got up, did the action they were practicing… and then set the whole thing up again and repeated!
I’m very confused by what you deem “narrativemancy” here. I have encountered the term before but I don’t think it was intentionally taught as a CFAR technique or used internally as an explicit technique. IIRC the term also had at least somewhat negative valence.
I should clarify that I have been less involved in “day-to-day” CFAR stuff since mid-late 2016, though I have been at I believe a large majority of mainline workshops (I think I’m one of the most active instructors). It’s possible that the things you describe were occurring but in ways that I didn’t see. That said, they really don’t match with my picture of what working at CFAR was like.