What is Going On With CFAR?

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 [ Question ] 

 What is Going On With CFAR? 

 by niplav 28th May 2022 1 min read A 3 34 95

 Whispers have been going around on the internet . People have been talking , using words like "defunct" or "inactive" (not yet "dead").

 The last update to the website was December 2020 (the copyright on the website states "© Copyright 2011-2021 Center for Applied Rationality. All rights reserved."), the last large-scale public communication was end of 2019 (that I know of).

 If CFAR is now "defunct", it might be useful for the rest of the world to know about that, because the problem of making humans and groups more rational hasn't disappeared, and some people might want to pick up the challenge (and perhaps talk to people who were involved in it to rescue some of the conclusions and insights). 

 Additionally, it would be interesting to hear why the endeavour was abandoned in the end, to avoid going on wild goose-chases oneself (or, in the very boring case, to discover that they ran out of funding (though that appears unlikely to me)). 

 If CFAR isn't "defunct", I can see a few possibilities:

 
 It's working on some super-secret projects, perhaps in conjunction with MIRI (which sounds reasonable enough, but there's still value left on the table with distributing rationality training and raising the civilizational sanity)

 They are going about their regular business, but the social network they operate in is large enough that they don't need to advertise on their website (I think this is unlikely, it contradicts most of the evidence in the comments linked above)

 
 So, what is going on?

 What is Going On With CFAR? 136 AnnaSalamon 54 gjm 13 AnnaSalamon 48 gjm 9 clone of saturn 4 AnnaSalamon 11 Richard_Kennaway 45 Henry Prowbell 37 AnnaSalamon 29 AnnaSalamon 9 Yitz 6 LoganStrohl 1 Alex Hedtke 19 Ben Pace 12 Duncan Sabien (Inactive) 5 Ben Pace 5 Duncan Sabien (Inactive) 10 Duncan Sabien (Inactive) 25 corinfinite 9 Valentine 13 AnnaSalamon 7 AnnaSalamon 2 niplav 21 James_Miller 11 gjm 14 niplav 9 Duncan Sabien (Inactive) 8 AnnaSalamon 5 Alex_Altair 2 Yitz 11 AnnaSalamon 10 lc 5 Adam Zerner 4 MNoetel New Answer New Comment Submit 3 Answers sorted by top scoring 

 AnnaSalamon 

 May 29, 2022 

 136 1 CFAR is not defunct.  I am at a workshop right now with Jack and Vaniver (who also work with CFAR), and 7 other people, who are mostly adjunct CFAR instructors (aka, people who are skilled enough to run CFAR classes if they want, and who've trained with us some, but who usually do only very few hours of CFAR-esque work in a typical year), trying things out.  Dan Keys is the fourth person who is also on CFAR's "core staff" (though we are all part-time hourly); there's also a number of

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