Upcoming Workshops
Information on all upcoming 4-day workshops
More on the process by which we grow workshops
Our workshops are “grown” rather than designed, in the sense that we pay great attention to people as we try our rationality techniques with them, and we revise the techniques depending on what seems useful (both while we talk with people, and weeks or months later, when we check back in).
(We also hand units between instructors whenever the units stabilize too much, or the instructor seems no longer to find the unit a fresh window into the workshop participants and the world. Also, we study one anothers’ techniques deeply, and we tune as best we can into the weird/wonderful/interesting skills of those who come. By these and other means, we work to create a “whole” art, where each of the pieces of our workshop have grown in contact with other pieces of the workshop, and with as much of the world as we can get into contact with.)
CFAR was originally founded because some of us were extreme fans of Eliezer’s Sequences, and HPMOR. Then, we tried doing rationality techniques with people in real-life (through what was eventually about sixty iterations of 4.5-day many-person events, plus many test sessions on volunteers, across a decade). We still liked the goals of Eliezer’s Sequences – “Form true beliefs” and “Achieve one’s goals”, but we soon started looking for ways to get patterns for doing this further into the viscera, for making more and better use of the large, parallel, automatic parts of the mind, and for connecting rationality more to everyday life problems and feedback loops.
More recently, we revised things further, to the point where we’re calling these upcoming workshops “pilots”. You can read more about the currents underlying our latest workshops in our recent post on the rationality community blog LessWrong.
Some relevant numbers...
- 9.2 average response, from past participants, to the question “On a scale from 1 (not at all) to 10 (extremely): Are you glad you came to the workshop?”
- 96 hours of fully immersive instruction
- 1 to 5 (or better) staff to participant ratio, so there’s always someone available before and after class to discuss applying the material in your life
Organizations we've collaborated with
