On the payment model, imagine that instead of putting their material on choosing a high impact career online, 80k charged people £3000 to have 4 day coaching and networking retreats in a large mansion, afterwards giving them access to the relevant written material.
CFAR’s model is actually pretty similar to 80k’s here. CFAR generally either heavily discounts or waives the cost of the workshop for people they think are likely to contribute to the long-term-future, or are more broadly promising, and who don’t have the money to pay for the workshop. As such the relevant comparison is more “should 80k offer paid coaching (in addition to their free coaching) at relatively high rates for people who they think are less likely to contribute to improving the world, if the money they earn from that allows them to offer the other free coaching services (or scale them up by 30% or something like that)”, to which my answer would be “yes”.
My sense is that 80k is in a better-funded position, and so this tradeoff doesn’t really come up, but I would be surprised if they never considered it in the past (though career coaching is probably somewhat harder to monetize than the kind of product CFAR is selling).
I also think you are underestimating to what degree the paid workshops were a necessity for CFAR historically having gotten to exist. Since there is a lot of downtime cost in being able to run workshops (you need to have a critical mass of teaching staff, you need to do a lot of curriculum development, have reliable venues, etc.) and the EA community didn’t really exist yet when CFAR got started, it was never really an option for CFAR to fully run off of donations, and CFAR additionally wanted to make sure it actually produced something that people would be willing to pay for, so offering paid workshops was one of the only ways to achieve those two goals. I also generally think it’s a good idea for projects like CFAR to ensure that they are producing a product that people are willing to pay significant amount of money for, which is at least a basic sanity check on whether you are doing anything real.
As an example, I encouraged Lynette to ask people whether they would be willing to pay for her coaching, and ideally ask them for at least some payment even if she can’t break even, to make sure that the people she is offering services to are filtered for the people who get enough value out of it to spend $50 per session, or something in that space (she had also considered that already on her own, though I don’t remember the current state of her asking her clients for payment).
I just remembered that 80k actually did consider monetizing part of it’s coaching in 2014, which would have probably resulted in a pretty similar model to CFAR:
Is there a subsection of the audience who might be willing to pay forcoaching?
We’re interesting in the possibility of making part of the coaching self-funding. Our best guess was that the people who will be most willing to pay for coaching are people from tech and finance backgrounds aged 25-35. We found that about 20% of the requests fell in this category, which was higher than our expectations.
Re retreats:
I think it’s quite plausible that 80k organizing retreats would be quite valuable, in particular in a world where CFAR isn’t filling that current niche. CEA also organized a large number of retreats of a similar type in the last year (I attended one on individual outreach, and I know that they organized multiple retreats for group organizers, and at least one operations retreat) presumably because they think that is indeed a good idea (the one that I attended did seem reasonably valuable, and a lot of the design of it was clearly influenced by CFAR workshops, though I can’t speak on whether that overall initiative was worth it).
afterwards giving them access to the relevant written material
I agree that 80k also has a lot of impact via their written material, but I think that is because they have invested a very large fraction of their resources into producing those materials (80K would likely be unable to run as many workshops as CFAR and also produce the written material). I think if 80k was focusing primarily on coaching, it would be very unlikely to produce good written material that would stand well on its own, though I expect it would still produce a good amount of value (and it might still produce some writings, but likely not ones that make much sense without the context of the coaching, similar to CFAR). As such I am skeptical of your claim that switching to that model would get rid of ~100% of 80k’s value. I expect it would change their value proposition, but likely still have a good chance of being competitive in terms of impact (and fully switching towards a coaching model was something that I’ve heard 80k consider multiple times over the years).
Your answer could be expressed in the form of premises right? Premises are just propositions that bear on the likelihood of the conclusion
I think if you define “premise” more broadly to mean “propositions that bear on the likelihood of the conclusion” then you are closer, but still not fully there. A crux would then be defined “a set of premises that when falsified, would provide enough evidence that you would change your mind on the high-level claim”, which is importantly still different from “identifying differences in our premises”, in particular it emphasizes identifying specific premises that are particularly load-bearing for the argument at hand.
(This wouldn’t be a very standard usage of “premise” and doesn’t seem to align super well with any definitions I can find in any dictionaries, which all tend to either be about logical inference or about subsets of a specific logical argument that is being outlined, but doesn’t seem like a horrible stretch from available definitions. Though I wouldn’t expect people to intuitively know what you mean by that definition of “premise”)
I do still expect people to give quite drastically different answers if you ask them “is ‘not X’ a premise of your belief?” vs. “would observing X change your mind about this belief?”. So I wouldn’t recommend using that definition if you were actually trying to do the thing that double crux is trying to do, even if you define it beforehand. I do think that the norms from (classical) rhetoric and philosophy of trying to identify differences in your premises are good norms and generally make conversations go better. I agree that Double Crux is trying to operationalize and build on that, and isn’t doing some weird completely novel thing, though I do think it extends on it in a bunch of non-trivial ways.
I disagree that 80k should transition towards a £3k retreat + no online content model, but it doesn’t seem worth getting into why here.
On premises, here is the top definition I have found from googling… “a previous statement or proposition from which another is inferred or follows as a conclusion”. This fits with my (and CFAR’s) characterisation of double cruxing. I think we’re agreed that the question is which premises you disagree on cause your disagreement. It is logically impossible that double cruxing extends this characterisation.
I disagree that 80k should transition towards a £3k retreat + no online content model, but it doesn’t seem worth getting into why here.
I never said 80k should transition towards a retreat + no online content model. What I said is that it seems plausible to me it would still produce a lot of value in that case, though I agree that their current model seems likely a better fit for them, and probably overall more valuable. Presumably you also disagree with that, but it seemed important to distinguish.
“a previous statement or proposition from which another is inferred or follows as a conclusion”
Given that in the scenario as outlined, there was no “previous statement” or “previous proposition”, I am still confused how you think this definition fits. In the scenario at hand, nobody first outlined their complete argument for why they think the claim discussed is true, and as such, there is no “previous statement or proposition” that can be referred back to. This definition seems to refer mostly to logical argument, which doesn’t really apply to most human cognition.
I am not super excited about debating definitions, and we both agree that using the word premise is at least somewhat close to the right concept, so I am not very excited about continuing this thread further. If you really care about this, I would be glad to set up an experiment on mechanical turk in which we ask participants to list the necessary premises of a belief they hold, and see how much their responses differ from asking them what observations would change their mind about X. It seems clear to me that their responses would differ significantly.
which premises you disagree on cause your disagreement.
This is still only capturing half of it, even under the definition of premise that you’ve outlined here, which seems to be a reasonable definition of what a crux for a single participant in the conversation is. A double crux would be “a set of premises, that when viewed as a new conjunctive proposition you both assign opposite truth values to, that when flipped would cause both of you to change their mind”. Though that alone obviously doesn’t yet make a procedure, so there is still a bunch more structure, but I would think of the above as an accurate enough description to start working with it.
It is logically impossible that double cruxing extends this characterisation.
I don’t think I really know how to engage with this. Obviously it’s possible for double-crux to extend this characterization. I even outlined a key piece that was missing from it in the above paragraph.
But it’s also a procedure that is meant to be used with real people, where every bit of framing and instruction matters. If you really believe this, let us run a test and just give one group of people the instruction “find the premises on which you disagree on that cause your disagreement” and the other group the full double crux worksheet. Presumably you agree that the behavior of those groups will drastically differ.
You maybe have something more specific in mind when you mean “logically impossible”, but given that we are talking about a high-level procedure proofs of logical impossibility seem highly unlikely to me.
CFAR’s model is actually pretty similar to 80k’s here. CFAR generally either heavily discounts or waives the cost of the workshop for people they think are likely to contribute to the long-term-future, or are more broadly promising, and who don’t have the money to pay for the workshop. As such the relevant comparison is more “should 80k offer paid coaching (in addition to their free coaching) at relatively high rates for people who they think are less likely to contribute to improving the world, if the money they earn from that allows them to offer the other free coaching services (or scale them up by 30% or something like that)”, to which my answer would be “yes”.
My sense is that 80k is in a better-funded position, and so this tradeoff doesn’t really come up, but I would be surprised if they never considered it in the past (though career coaching is probably somewhat harder to monetize than the kind of product CFAR is selling).
I also think you are underestimating to what degree the paid workshops were a necessity for CFAR historically having gotten to exist. Since there is a lot of downtime cost in being able to run workshops (you need to have a critical mass of teaching staff, you need to do a lot of curriculum development, have reliable venues, etc.) and the EA community didn’t really exist yet when CFAR got started, it was never really an option for CFAR to fully run off of donations, and CFAR additionally wanted to make sure it actually produced something that people would be willing to pay for, so offering paid workshops was one of the only ways to achieve those two goals. I also generally think it’s a good idea for projects like CFAR to ensure that they are producing a product that people are willing to pay significant amount of money for, which is at least a basic sanity check on whether you are doing anything real.
As an example, I encouraged Lynette to ask people whether they would be willing to pay for her coaching, and ideally ask them for at least some payment even if she can’t break even, to make sure that the people she is offering services to are filtered for the people who get enough value out of it to spend $50 per session, or something in that space (she had also considered that already on her own, though I don’t remember the current state of her asking her clients for payment).
I just remembered that 80k actually did consider monetizing part of it’s coaching in 2014, which would have probably resulted in a pretty similar model to CFAR:
Re retreats:
I think it’s quite plausible that 80k organizing retreats would be quite valuable, in particular in a world where CFAR isn’t filling that current niche. CEA also organized a large number of retreats of a similar type in the last year (I attended one on individual outreach, and I know that they organized multiple retreats for group organizers, and at least one operations retreat) presumably because they think that is indeed a good idea (the one that I attended did seem reasonably valuable, and a lot of the design of it was clearly influenced by CFAR workshops, though I can’t speak on whether that overall initiative was worth it).
I agree that 80k also has a lot of impact via their written material, but I think that is because they have invested a very large fraction of their resources into producing those materials (80K would likely be unable to run as many workshops as CFAR and also produce the written material). I think if 80k was focusing primarily on coaching, it would be very unlikely to produce good written material that would stand well on its own, though I expect it would still produce a good amount of value (and it might still produce some writings, but likely not ones that make much sense without the context of the coaching, similar to CFAR). As such I am skeptical of your claim that switching to that model would get rid of ~100% of 80k’s value. I expect it would change their value proposition, but likely still have a good chance of being competitive in terms of impact (and fully switching towards a coaching model was something that I’ve heard 80k consider multiple times over the years).
I think if you define “premise” more broadly to mean “propositions that bear on the likelihood of the conclusion” then you are closer, but still not fully there. A crux would then be defined “a set of premises that when falsified, would provide enough evidence that you would change your mind on the high-level claim”, which is importantly still different from “identifying differences in our premises”, in particular it emphasizes identifying specific premises that are particularly load-bearing for the argument at hand.
(This wouldn’t be a very standard usage of “premise” and doesn’t seem to align super well with any definitions I can find in any dictionaries, which all tend to either be about logical inference or about subsets of a specific logical argument that is being outlined, but doesn’t seem like a horrible stretch from available definitions. Though I wouldn’t expect people to intuitively know what you mean by that definition of “premise”)
I do still expect people to give quite drastically different answers if you ask them “is ‘not X’ a premise of your belief?” vs. “would observing X change your mind about this belief?”. So I wouldn’t recommend using that definition if you were actually trying to do the thing that double crux is trying to do, even if you define it beforehand. I do think that the norms from (classical) rhetoric and philosophy of trying to identify differences in your premises are good norms and generally make conversations go better. I agree that Double Crux is trying to operationalize and build on that, and isn’t doing some weird completely novel thing, though I do think it extends on it in a bunch of non-trivial ways.
I disagree that 80k should transition towards a £3k retreat + no online content model, but it doesn’t seem worth getting into why here.
On premises, here is the top definition I have found from googling… “a previous statement or proposition from which another is inferred or follows as a conclusion”. This fits with my (and CFAR’s) characterisation of double cruxing. I think we’re agreed that the question is which premises you disagree on cause your disagreement. It is logically impossible that double cruxing extends this characterisation.
I never said 80k should transition towards a retreat + no online content model. What I said is that it seems plausible to me it would still produce a lot of value in that case, though I agree that their current model seems likely a better fit for them, and probably overall more valuable. Presumably you also disagree with that, but it seemed important to distinguish.
Given that in the scenario as outlined, there was no “previous statement” or “previous proposition”, I am still confused how you think this definition fits. In the scenario at hand, nobody first outlined their complete argument for why they think the claim discussed is true, and as such, there is no “previous statement or proposition” that can be referred back to. This definition seems to refer mostly to logical argument, which doesn’t really apply to most human cognition.
I am not super excited about debating definitions, and we both agree that using the word premise is at least somewhat close to the right concept, so I am not very excited about continuing this thread further. If you really care about this, I would be glad to set up an experiment on mechanical turk in which we ask participants to list the necessary premises of a belief they hold, and see how much their responses differ from asking them what observations would change their mind about X. It seems clear to me that their responses would differ significantly.
This is still only capturing half of it, even under the definition of premise that you’ve outlined here, which seems to be a reasonable definition of what a crux for a single participant in the conversation is. A double crux would be “a set of premises, that when viewed as a new conjunctive proposition you both assign opposite truth values to, that when flipped would cause both of you to change their mind”. Though that alone obviously doesn’t yet make a procedure, so there is still a bunch more structure, but I would think of the above as an accurate enough description to start working with it.
I don’t think I really know how to engage with this. Obviously it’s possible for double-crux to extend this characterization. I even outlined a key piece that was missing from it in the above paragraph.
But it’s also a procedure that is meant to be used with real people, where every bit of framing and instruction matters. If you really believe this, let us run a test and just give one group of people the instruction “find the premises on which you disagree on that cause your disagreement” and the other group the full double crux worksheet. Presumably you agree that the behavior of those groups will drastically differ.
You maybe have something more specific in mind when you mean “logically impossible”, but given that we are talking about a high-level procedure proofs of logical impossibility seem highly unlikely to me.