How strongly does the CFAR-sphere claim its techniques work?
The Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) is a Berkeley nonprofit that runs paid workshops teaching cognitive techniques drawn from the LessWrong rationalist community. In a long-running thread on the CFAR alumni list, Alyssa had argued that any tool which simultaneously claims to deliver both better factual beliefs and a happier, more effective life should be regarded with suspicion — this is the “suspicious convergence” pattern, where someone’s favored intervention conveniently solves every problem at once. Another alumnus pushed back: maybe CFAR-style rationality just produces some positive effects across many dimensions, which is much weaker and more believable than claiming it’s the best tool for any of them. The reply below concedes the distinction but argues that, whatever the alumnus personally believes, the public claims circulating in the CFAR/LessWrong sphere are in fact much stronger — and the documentary evidence is supplied at length.
That’s a fair distinction, and I didn’t make it carefully. The claim “CFAR techniques have some positive effects” is much easier to believe than “CFAR techniques are the best option, or comparable to the best options”. Heck, maybe garlic does have a (very small) effect on all those diseases, at least if you’re comparing it to Twinkies.
However, my guess is that many people in the CFAR-sphere have much stronger beliefs about the efficacy of CFAR techniques (or applied rationality, or whatever you want to call it) than the weak version above. I could be wrong, in which case the argument doesn’t apply. But here are some relevant quotes: “I do not say this lightly… but if you’re looking for superpowers, this is the place to start.” ( LessWrong minicamp post , quote from participant) “This was easily the most powerful change self-modification I’ve ever made, in all of the social, intellectual, and emotional spheres.” ( LessWrong minicamp post , quote from participant) “I look forward to sharing what I’ve learned with my local Lesswrong meetup and others in the area. If that’s even 1/4 as awesome as my time at the Mini-Camp, it will make our lives much better.” ( LessWrong minicamp post , quote from participant; emphasis in original) “It has been true over the course of human history that improvements in world welfare have often been tied to improvements in explicit thinking skills, most notably with the invention of science. Even for someone who doesn’t think that existential risk is the right place to look, trying to invest more in good reasoning, qua good reasoning — doubling down on the huge benefits which explicit cognitive skills have already brought humanity — is a plausible candidate for the highest-impact marginal altruism.” ( Why CFAR ) “CFAR has the very ambitious goal of creating guardians of humanity with hero-level competence, altruism, and epistemic rationality, but has so far mainly succeeded in some improvements in personal effectiveness for solving one’s own life problems.” ( Why CFAR comments ) “The people I’ve met who have LW accounts have all seemed much more competent, fun, and agenty than all of my ‘normal’ friends.” ( Why don’t rationalists win, comment ) “What I think we really need is a list of concrete examples of how the tools of epistemic rationality, as they’re taught in the Sequences, can improve your health, your career, your love life, the causes you care about, your psychological well-being, and so on.” ( How rationality can make your life more awesome ) “I went to the July workshop. I think it was probably the most useful week of my life in terms of exposure to things I could be doing to be more productive and effective.” ( CFAR comment ) “Competence is pretty darn helpful too [for solving very large problems] — it’s good to e.g. be able to go out there and get data; to be able to form networking relations with folks who already know things; etc. — but epistemic rationality is necessary in a more fundamental way.” ( Why CFAR’s mission ) “If most people understood just the basics Occam’s razor, what constitutes evidence and why, general trends of science, reductionism, and cognitive biases, the world would be greatly improved.” ( Back to the basics of rationality ; emphasis in original) “A second goal [of Less Wrong, before there was CFAR] is to attract some of the best human brains on the planet and make progress on issues related to the Friendly AI problem, the problem with the greatest leverage in the universe.” ( Back to the basics of rationality ) “There are many people like myself and jwhendy who can be massively impacted for the better not by coming to a realization about algorithmic learning theory, but by coming to understand the basics of rationality like probability and the proper role of belief and reductionism.” ( Back to the basics of rationality ; emphasis in original) “We therefore urgently need more investment in developing the talent pipeline. CFAR looks like the most efficient apparatus we have for fixing this problem.” ( CFAR 2015 fundraiser ) “Our goal is not to help a few hundred or a few thousand individuals, but rather to build the sort of world where organizations with the kind of long-term vision exhibited by the Gates Foundation, SpaceX, GiveWell, and the Future of Humanity Institute are the norm rather than the exception.” ( CFAR 2015 fundraiser ) “CFAR’s material has made me a super-effective entrepreneur. (…) I can’t recommend it more highly.” ( CFAR 2015 fundraiser , quote from participant) “Now one can’t simultaneously define ‘rationality’ as the winning Way, and define ‘rationality’ as Bayesian probability theory and decision theory. But it is the argument that I am putting forth, and the moral of my advice to Trust In Bayes, that the laws governing winning have indeed proven to be math. If it ever turns out that Bayes fails — receives systematically lower rewards on some problem, relative to a superior alternative, in virtue of its mere decisions — then Bayes has to go out the window. ‘Rationality’ is just the label I use for my beliefs about the winning Way — the Way of the agent smiling from on top of the giant heap of utility. Currently, that label refers to Bayescraft.” ( Newcomb’s Problem and the Regret of Rationality )