5 ms·

Yeah, once only. Feel free to ask. I attended in... April 2013, I think, and then helped out at another of their workshops in I think November 2014. So I might

by philh 11y ago

Yeah, once only. Feel free to ask. I attended in... April 2013, I think, and then helped out at another of their workshops in I think November 2014. So I might not remember things in much detail, and I don't know what changes have happened since, but I'll answer the best I can. Also, someone linked to this thread on the CFAR alumni mailing list, so others might see your questions and be able to answer better. (Actually, another caveat: for at least some of the questions you could plausibly ask, the true-and-complete answer includes uncomfortable personal details that I'd rather not share. So still feel free to ask, but I may elide those details.)

RikNieu 11y ago
Yeah, no , I won't ask anything too personal. 1. Why the high cost? Was this addressed? 2. Do you personally feel the cost was justified? 3. What benefits/improvements specifically did you notice afterwards. 4. And your friend? Did their life or attitude observably improve? 5. How much of what you learned is freely available on the net? In other words, is the course simply a curated set of information that is otherwise available elsewhere? 6. Do you still receive regular communications from CFAR, and if so, what do these communications consist of? 7.(last one!) Regarding the uncomfortable personal questions, was this information that CFAR recorded and archived? Thanks!
- philh 11y ago
  1. It costs a lot to run. They have to rent out space, get meals, snacks, stationary. The staff:attendee ratio is pretty high. And they need to meet their general operating costs - office space and staff - not just for the workshops but as an organization. They've written about their finances: http://lesswrong.com/lw/n39/why_cfar_the_view_from_2015/#finances http://lesswrong.com/lw/n39/why_cfar_the_view_from_2015/#fin... (you might also find the rest of that interesting). 2. Justified for them to charge, certainly. Worthwhile for me to pay, I think so. 3. Difficult to say, partly because I don't have strong memories of what I was like before attending. I think that post-CFAR, I'm generally happier, more likely to try new things, better at making phone calls. I expect other changes too. But I can't say that these are definitely attributed to CFAR. It's also difficult because I don't often explicitly use the techniques they teach, but that doesn't mean I don't use them. E.g. about six months ago I went mostly-vegetarian. I realized that for the most part, I'm just as happy without meat as with it, but there are exceptions. So I let myself have those exceptions, and get almost all the benefits of vegetarianism with few of the costs. This was a form of goal factoring, and I don't know if I would have done it without CFAR. But I didn't sit down and think "okay, I'm going to goal factor this". 4. I'm not sure. This was too long ago, and I don't think I saw him super-often around that time period. 5. I suspect most of the specific techniques can be found elsewhere in one form or another. They run tests to try to find the best way to teach the techniques. There's also value in curation, and in having someone there to help dubug and adapt to circumstances. ("You suggest committing to a specific time to do this, but I'm reluctant because my social life is pretty unpredictable." "Sure, maybe try picking a time, but giving yourself permission to change it, maybe up to three times.") But what they're trying to teach isn't really techniques. This won't do it justice, but it's closer to: they're trying to teach the mindset that lets you generate the techniques. That lets you say, "okay, here's a problem. Let's try to solve it. Is this solution going to work? No. Okay, what could I do that would actually work?" and to come up with answers. I'm not aware of any other resources trying to teach that. 6. They have an alumni mailing list, but CFAR doesn't post to it much as an organization. They sometimes ask for volunteers to help out at workshops, or if someone can help them scope out venues, or for beta testers for classes they're working on. Outside that, I don't receive anything from them (except automated thank-you emails when I donate). 7. Not at all. Some of it came up during conversations, either naturally or deliberately as something I chose for comfort zone expansion. There was also a session of "againstness training", which was even more optional than everything else, in which Valentine deliberately asked me uncomfortable questions so I could practice being in a super-uncomfortable state. When I said about personal stuff, I just meant that - for example, if one thing I'd got from CFAR had been "I realized I could come out to my closest friends, but probably not my family", then I wasn't going to make that public knowledge. It wasn't to do with CFAR itself.
  - RikNieu 11y ago
    Cool, thanks for the reply
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

by philh 11y ago

RikNieu 11y ago

Yeah, no , I won't ask anything too personal. 1. Why the high cost? Was this addressed? 2. Do you personally feel the cost was justified? 3. What benefits/improvements specifically did you notice afterwards. 4. And your friend? Did their life or attitude observably improve? 5. How much of what you learned is freely available on the net? In other words, is the course simply a curated set of information that is otherwise available elsewhere? 6. Do you still receive regular communications from CFAR, and if so, what do these communications consist of? 7.(last one!) Regarding the uncomfortable personal questions, was this information that CFAR recorded and archived? Thanks!

philh 11y ago
1. It costs a lot to run. They have to rent out space, get meals, snacks, stationary. The staff:attendee ratio is pretty high. And they need to meet their general operating costs - office space and staff - not just for the workshops but as an organization. They've written about their finances: http://lesswrong.com/lw/n39/why_cfar_the_view_from_2015/#finances http://lesswrong.com/lw/n39/why_cfar_the_view_from_2015/#fin... (you might also find the rest of that interesting). 2. Justified for them to charge, certainly. Worthwhile for me to pay, I think so. 3. Difficult to say, partly because I don't have strong memories of what I was like before attending. I think that post-CFAR, I'm generally happier, more likely to try new things, better at making phone calls. I expect other changes too. But I can't say that these are definitely attributed to CFAR. It's also difficult because I don't often explicitly use the techniques they teach, but that doesn't mean I don't use them. E.g. about six months ago I went mostly-vegetarian. I realized that for the most part, I'm just as happy without meat as with it, but there are exceptions. So I let myself have those exceptions, and get almost all the benefits of vegetarianism with few of the costs. This was a form of goal factoring, and I don't know if I would have done it without CFAR. But I didn't sit down and think "okay, I'm going to goal factor this". 4. I'm not sure. This was too long ago, and I don't think I saw him super-often around that time period. 5. I suspect most of the specific techniques can be found elsewhere in one form or another. They run tests to try to find the best way to teach the techniques. There's also value in curation, and in having someone there to help dubug and adapt to circumstances. ("You suggest committing to a specific time to do this, but I'm reluctant because my social life is pretty unpredictable." "Sure, maybe try picking a time, but giving yourself permission to change it, maybe up to three times.") But what they're trying to teach isn't really techniques. This won't do it justice, but it's closer to: they're trying to teach the mindset that lets you generate the techniques. That lets you say, "okay, here's a problem. Let's try to solve it. Is this solution going to work? No. Okay, what could I do that would actually work?" and to come up with answers. I'm not aware of any other resources trying to teach that. 6. They have an alumni mailing list, but CFAR doesn't post to it much as an organization. They sometimes ask for volunteers to help out at workshops, or if someone can help them scope out venues, or for beta testers for classes they're working on. Outside that, I don't receive anything from them (except automated thank-you emails when I donate). 7. Not at all. Some of it came up during conversations, either naturally or deliberately as something I chose for comfort zone expansion. There was also a session of "againstness training", which was even more optional than everything else, in which Valentine deliberately asked me uncomfortable questions so I could practice being in a super-uncomfortable state. When I said about personal stuff, I just meant that - for example, if one thing I'd got from CFAR had been "I realized I could come out to my closest friends, but probably not my family", then I wasn't going to make that public knowledge. It wasn't to do with CFAR itself.
- RikNieu 11y ago
  Cool, thanks for the reply
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]