A lot of the examples you cite as potentially superior alternatives for spending $3,900 have a lot of opportunity cost because they take much more time than a weekend at CFAR. Once that’s accounted for, a lot of them are much more costly than CFAR for a lot of people.
That may be true of lots of the sort of alternatives I suggested, perhaps most of them, but I wouldn’t recommend effective altruists pursue most of the alternatives anyway. If I suggested a post-graduate certification or PD course to an effective altruist, I’d recommend a course than is better than other courses they’d choose from as well, in addition to being better than CFAR. Also, the costs for them may be greater than CFAR, but so would the benefits. To claim otherwise I think would be to overrate the value of a CFAR workshop. Note in this sort of evaluation I think the time and money of a random effective altruist is worth more than the time and money of a random person outside of EA, because what an effective altruist does with their time and money, or how they invest it, is expected to lead to much better results.
A lot of the examples you cite as potentially superior alternatives for spending $3,900 have a lot of opportunity cost because they take much more time than a weekend at CFAR. Once that’s accounted for, a lot of them are much more costly than CFAR for a lot of people.
That may be true of lots of the sort of alternatives I suggested, perhaps most of them, but I wouldn’t recommend effective altruists pursue most of the alternatives anyway. If I suggested a post-graduate certification or PD course to an effective altruist, I’d recommend a course than is better than other courses they’d choose from as well, in addition to being better than CFAR. Also, the costs for them may be greater than CFAR, but so would the benefits. To claim otherwise I think would be to overrate the value of a CFAR workshop. Note in this sort of evaluation I think the time and money of a random effective altruist is worth more than the time and money of a random person outside of EA, because what an effective altruist does with their time and money, or how they invest it, is expected to lead to much better results.