I strongly disagree with Greg. I think CFAR messed up very badly, but I think the way they messed up is totally consistent with also being able to add value in some situations.
We have data I find convincing suggesting a substantial fraction of top EAs got value from CFAR. ~ 5 years have passed since I went to a CFAR workshop, and I still value what I learned and think it’s been useful for my work. I would encourage other people who are curious to go (again, with the caveat that I don’t know much about the new program), if they feel like they’re in a place of relative strength and can take a discerning eye to what they’re taught.
If I, with (mostly) admirable candour, describe a series of grossly incompetent mistakes during my work as a doctor, the appropriate response may still be to disqualify me from future medical practice (there are sidelines re. incentives, but they don’t help)
I think doctor is a really disanalogous example to use; doctors are in one of the relatively few professions where screwups regularly lead to death; we want to some somewhat risk-averse, with respect to doctors (and e.g. pilots or school bus drivers), at least if the screwups are the very dangerous kind (as opposed to like, being terrible at filing one’s paperwork), and aren’t based on a reasonable CBA (e.g. enrolling patients in a clinical trial with a drug that looked promising but turned out to be dangerous). For lots of other professions, this example looks way less compelling; e.g. I doubt people would think that a startup founder or movie director or author who had a bunch of failures but also some big wins should be banned from their profession or ostracized in their community. I think in-person overnight events about psychology are in a pretty in-between risk category.
I don’t find said data convincing re. CFAR, for reasons I fear you’ve heard me rehearse ad nauseum. But this is less relevant: if it were just ‘CFAR, as an intervention, sucks’ I’d figure (and have figured over the last decade) that folks don’t need me to make up their own mind. The worst case, if that was true, is wasting some money and a few days of their time.
The doctor case was meant to illustrate that sufficiently consequential screw-ups in an activity can warrant disqualification from doing it again—even if one is candid and contrite about them. I agree activities vary in the prevalence of their “failure intolerable” tasks (medicine and aviation have a lot, creating a movie or a company very few). But most jobs which involve working with others have some things for which failure tolerance is ~zero, and these typically involve safety and safeguarding. For example, a teacher who messes up their lesson plans obviously shouldn’t be banned from their profession as a first resort; yet disqualification looks facially appropriate for one who allows their TA to try and abscond with one of their students on a field trip.
CFAR’s track record includes a litany of awful mistakes re. welfare and safeguarding where each taken alone would typically warrant suspension or disqualification, and in concert should guarantee the latter as it demonstrates—rather than (e.g.) “grave mistake which is an aberration from their usually excellent standards”—a pattern of gross negligence and utter corporate incompetence. Whatever degree of intermediate risk attending these workshops constitute is unwise to accept (or to encourage others accepting), given CFAR realising these risks is already well-established.
To build on Greg’s example, I think in normal circumstances, if eg a school was linked with a summer camp for high schoolers, and the summer camp made the errors outlined in the post linked to, then the school would correctly sever ties with the summer camp.
The mistakes made seem to me to be outrageously bad—they put teenagers in the custody of someone they had lots of evidence was an unethical sociopath, and they even let him ask a minor to go to Burning Man with him, and after that still didn’t ban him from their events (!). Although apparently little harm was done, this seems to me to have been very lucky, and if the minor had agreed (which CFAR apparently would not have prevented) this most likely would have ended extremely badly. If the minor had agreed and it had ended extremely badly, would you think that should disqualify them from running future events? If yes, why should the good fortune of the minor turning down the invitation make any difference to how we treat CFAR?
From accounts I heard later (I was not at the camp, but did hear a lot about it from folks who were), I’m basically certain CFAR would have interfered with the minor going even if the minor had agreed. Multiple CFAR staff members stepped in to attempt to prevent the minor from going (as mentioned in e.g. https://www.rationality.org/resources/updates/2019/cfars-mistakes-regarding-brent, and as I also remember from closer to time) much fuss was correctly made at the time, etc. I agree that many bad mistakes were made, then and previously and afterwards, however.
Also, after we eventually understood what the deal had been with Brent, we gave up running programs for minors. We continue to run programs for adults. My feeling is that adults should indeed not expect that we are vetting a particularly careful or safe environment particularly reliably, but that this is often not the crux for whether an adult wishes to attend a CFAR workshop.
I strongly disagree with Greg. I think CFAR messed up very badly, but I think the way they messed up is totally consistent with also being able to add value in some situations.
We have data I find convincing suggesting a substantial fraction of top EAs got value from CFAR. ~ 5 years have passed since I went to a CFAR workshop, and I still value what I learned and think it’s been useful for my work. I would encourage other people who are curious to go (again, with the caveat that I don’t know much about the new program), if they feel like they’re in a place of relative strength and can take a discerning eye to what they’re taught.
I think doctor is a really disanalogous example to use; doctors are in one of the relatively few professions where screwups regularly lead to death; we want to some somewhat risk-averse, with respect to doctors (and e.g. pilots or school bus drivers), at least if the screwups are the very dangerous kind (as opposed to like, being terrible at filing one’s paperwork), and aren’t based on a reasonable CBA (e.g. enrolling patients in a clinical trial with a drug that looked promising but turned out to be dangerous). For lots of other professions, this example looks way less compelling; e.g. I doubt people would think that a startup founder or movie director or author who had a bunch of failures but also some big wins should be banned from their profession or ostracized in their community. I think in-person overnight events about psychology are in a pretty in-between risk category.
I don’t find said data convincing re. CFAR, for reasons I fear you’ve heard me rehearse ad nauseum. But this is less relevant: if it were just ‘CFAR, as an intervention, sucks’ I’d figure (and have figured over the last decade) that folks don’t need me to make up their own mind. The worst case, if that was true, is wasting some money and a few days of their time.
The doctor case was meant to illustrate that sufficiently consequential screw-ups in an activity can warrant disqualification from doing it again—even if one is candid and contrite about them. I agree activities vary in the prevalence of their “failure intolerable” tasks (medicine and aviation have a lot, creating a movie or a company very few). But most jobs which involve working with others have some things for which failure tolerance is ~zero, and these typically involve safety and safeguarding. For example, a teacher who messes up their lesson plans obviously shouldn’t be banned from their profession as a first resort; yet disqualification looks facially appropriate for one who allows their TA to try and abscond with one of their students on a field trip.
CFAR’s track record includes a litany of awful mistakes re. welfare and safeguarding where each taken alone would typically warrant suspension or disqualification, and in concert should guarantee the latter as it demonstrates—rather than (e.g.) “grave mistake which is an aberration from their usually excellent standards”—a pattern of gross negligence and utter corporate incompetence. Whatever degree of intermediate risk attending these workshops constitute is unwise to accept (or to encourage others accepting), given CFAR realising these risks is already well-established.
To build on Greg’s example, I think in normal circumstances, if eg a school was linked with a summer camp for high schoolers, and the summer camp made the errors outlined in the post linked to, then the school would correctly sever ties with the summer camp.
The mistakes made seem to me to be outrageously bad—they put teenagers in the custody of someone they had lots of evidence was an unethical sociopath, and they even let him ask a minor to go to Burning Man with him, and after that still didn’t ban him from their events (!). Although apparently little harm was done, this seems to me to have been very lucky, and if the minor had agreed (which CFAR apparently would not have prevented) this most likely would have ended extremely badly. If the minor had agreed and it had ended extremely badly, would you think that should disqualify them from running future events? If yes, why should the good fortune of the minor turning down the invitation make any difference to how we treat CFAR?
From accounts I heard later (I was not at the camp, but did hear a lot about it from folks who were), I’m basically certain CFAR would have interfered with the minor going even if the minor had agreed. Multiple CFAR staff members stepped in to attempt to prevent the minor from going (as mentioned in e.g. https://www.rationality.org/resources/updates/2019/cfars-mistakes-regarding-brent, and as I also remember from closer to time) much fuss was correctly made at the time, etc. I agree that many bad mistakes were made, then and previously and afterwards, however.
Also, after we eventually understood what the deal had been with Brent, we gave up running programs for minors. We continue to run programs for adults. My feeling is that adults should indeed not expect that we are vetting a particularly careful or safe environment particularly reliably, but that this is often not the crux for whether an adult wishes to attend a CFAR workshop.