TechTakes

CFAR seems to have pivoted back to focusing on the workshops. Their winter 2025/2026 fundraiser only raised $10k with a goal of $125k. The curriculum sounds very New Age:

If you’ve been to a CFAR workshop in the ~2015-2020 era, you should expect that current ones: ... Have roughly 1/3rd new content, mostly aimed at practical ways to be less “seeing like a state” when applying rationality techniques, and to be more “a proud gardener of the living processes inside you / a free person with increasing powers of authorship.” (We've been calling this thread "honoring who-ness.")

No masks in their photo of a workshop posted February 2025 (2024 was a pretty bad year for airborne infections where I live, and alienated educated young people are more likely to wear respirators than normies, so I would expect to see someone in that room wearing a N95 or Flo). The venue is about a 90 minute drive from Oakland, CA (the East Bay).

This paragraph leapt out at me:

On Day 4 of the four day workshop, we spent three and a half hours on an activity called Questing, in which participants took turns being the “hero” (who worked on whatever they liked) and the “sidekick” (who assisted at the hero’s direction) for ~10 minute chunks. This activity was extremely well-liked (did best of all activities on our survey; many said many great things about it).

If you read that and say "doesn't that sound like Effort Exchange in the Dragon Army Barracks?" you should go home and rethink the regrettable things you learn on the Internet. I look forward to reading the book on LessWrong, the splinter sects, and just how much they had in common after a hard day gardening in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Before FTX collapsed my model of LW was something like cryptozoology enthusiasts who trade posts and sometimes meet at a con, now its more like Scientology. Early Scientology offered a community and a path to self-improvement.