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Andrew Critch - CFAR
webacritch.com·acritch.com/cfar/
This page is historically relevant as CFAR was a key institution in the early rationalist-EA-AI safety ecosystem; many prominent AI safety researchers passed through CFAR workshops or were influenced by its community.
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Importance: 28/100blog posthomepage
Summary
Andrew Critch describes his role in cofounding CFAR (2011-2012) with Anna Salamon, Julia Galef, and Michael Smith, a non-profit running workshops on rational decision-making grounded in cognitive science. The page outlines CFAR's mission to apply insights from psychology, behavioral economics, and Bayesian reasoning to improve individual and collective decision-making, with explicit connections to effective altruism and AI safety communities.
Key Points
- •Critch cofounded CFAR in Berkeley with Anna Salamon, Julia Galef, and Michael Smith as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit focused on applied rationality workshops.
- •CFAR draws on cognitive science research (Kahneman & Tversky tradition) and fields like game theory, neuroscience, and statistics to teach effective reasoning.
- •Rationality is framed as both a science and a collaborative art, distinct from cold Spock-like logic or self-interested homo economicus models.
- •CFAR explicitly connects rationality training to effective altruism, citing GiveWell as an example of rationality applied to altruistic decision-making.
- •The page situates CFAR within a broader rationality social movement including LessWrong and OvercomingBias communities, relevant to early AI safety culture.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Center for Applied Rationality | Organization | 62.0 |
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The Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) | Andrew Critch
Andrew Critch
PhD, UC Berkeley
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The Center for Applied Rationality
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The Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR)
Between 2011 and 2012, I cofounded the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) in Berkeley, California, with Anna Salamon, Julia Galef, and Michael Smith. CFAR is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization which runs workshops on rational decision-making skills, as informed by cognitive science research in the line of Kahnemann and Tversky , and of course, data collected from previous workshops. Check it out!
At CFAR, we ask: Can we do more for the world by learning about cognitive biases like scope insensitivity that might thwart our attempts to make altruistic decisions? Can we get more use out of our gut instincts by learning what their strengths and weaknesses are? Can playing cooperative games with intuitive Bayesian reasoning improve our ability to assess arguments and reason collectively in groups?
Questions about human rationality fascinate me. By “rationality”, I mean the non-trivial art and science of reasoning and acting effectively to achieve goals. This is the cognitive science sense of the word “rational”, which doesn’t mean being cold and unemotional like Mr. Spock (who in my estimation, is comically irrational ), and doesn’t mean being self-centered like homo economicus . In fact, rationality is an important tool for effective altruism; look at GiveWell.org for example.
Understanding rationality requires science — fields like psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics — as well as disciplines like ma
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