Published on May 29, 2025 10:02 PM GMT
Hello from the Center for Applied Rationality!
Some of you may have attended our classic applied rationality workshops in the past; others of you may have wanted to attend a workshop but not yet had a chance to. It's been a while since we've last run public-facing workshops, but we wanted to say:
- We're not dead! (More on that perhaps in a later post)
We have a new experimental mini-workshop coming up soon and hopefully more workshop content to follow after!
Our new workshop will be held after LessOnline at the upcoming Arbor Summer Camp program; classes will begin after lunch on Monday 6/2 and end just before lunch on Thursday 6/5. Some things to know about the upcoming workshop:
This workshop is "mini"
This workshop will last for about three days (two half-days on the edges, two full days in the middle), instead of our usual ~four-and-a-half.
Also, it’ll be embedded in “Arbor Summer Camp” and we’ll be mingling with the ~300 overall Arbor attendees for mealtimes and evenings, whereas normal CFAR workshops are standalone events that are more separate/immersive at those times.
What you’ll get and what you won’t get if you attend:
We will run a roughly 50/50 mixture of traditional CFAR content (such as Inner Simulator; TAPs, Goal Factoring, Double Crux, Resolve Cycles, Focusing), and some newer experimental material (beta tests, hoping to get your help making it good).
The newer material here is aimed at:
- Treating participants more obviously as fellow investigators and the authors of your own lives (you always were, of course, but: making this more obviously the foundation of how the workshop is working)
Noticing the ways in which people (you; us) are organic wholes, and trying not to trample on that with our “rationality practices”, but instead to be good gardeners of the health of our organisms overall. (Or, if you’d like that phrased more technically: we’ll be trying to cultivate virtues and habits such that the mesaoptimizers who arise within us end up helping us be perceptive, coherent, and long-time-horizoned rather than hunkered-down, exhausted, and at short-sighted odds with ourselves)
Again, this is a beta test; come if you’d like to be part of the co-development of a new workshop, and to learn the basics of our classic curriculum.
We’ve taught at many workshops before, but this is still an experimental program -- don’t expect a super polished experience! (We are parts of a team at CFAR who will be developing new workshops over the next year or so; this will be our first live test with some of this new material!)
What it means that this’ll be at Arbor Summer Camp:
We’ll be on Lighthaven’s zany campus (full of personality and small conversational nooks), and there’ll be about 300 interesting people to meet during evenings and mealtimes! That said, we’ll have less of an immersive "all CFAR all the time" atmosphere than you’d get at a normal CFAR workshop; most other camp attendees will be participating in other programs rather than attending ours.
If you’d like to sign up for this workshop:
Signups for the mini-workshop are first come first served. Pricing is $750 for the CFAR event, plus another $450 to sign up for Arbor. This is notably cheaper than the $3900 we've historically charged for most mainline CFAR workshops, since it's a more experimental program -- future workshops will likely be more expensive than this test.
If you can’t come, but want to try our stuff at upcoming free online test sessions:
Sign up for test sessions here if you want to volunteer for ~1 hour stints helping us play-test future CFAR curricula, online or in Berkeley.
If you're interested in being added to our list of people to contact for future workshops:
Use our workshop application form and check the box for "Mailing list for when new workshops get announced".
Thanks for reading and hope to see some of you at the mini-workshop -- and if not, perhaps we'll meet at a test session or future CFAR program!
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