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.
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.