# More details on CFAR’s new workshops

*(This post is part of a sequence of year-end efforts to invite real conversation about CFAR; you’ll find more about our* [*workshops*](https://rationality.org/workshops/upcoming)*, as well as our* [*fundraiser*](https://rationality.org/workshops/upcoming)*, at* [*What’s going on at CFAR? Updates and Fundraiser*](https://www.lesswrong.com/editPost?postId=4W8ZbcRr47x9bNEf6&key=df7e6765bee4d939f40f4bd27ce3da#fnhy63udts1ev)*.)*

![](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw/AP1GczOpmHygDNfLemtJrD6HU9BtsE4DlddtG0AvkguKlQ5devFWeWRgb-ciDbt-a1ZArtI5GLis23JPHfOJtc8EOIqTrXdrPgUzrgWbLOmxbST8LO3PtTyLEJbio4FOlVPMVm3NdvhLLpQ_FS0OaEdFinvIEA=w2500-h1876-s-no-gm?authuser=0)

If you’d like to know more about CFAR’s current workshops (either because you’re thinking of attending / sending a friend, or because you’re just interested), this post is for you. Our focus in this post is on the new parts of our content. Kibitzing on content is welcome and appreciated regardless of whether or not you’re interested in the workshop.

The core workshop format is unchanged:

*   4.5 days of immersion with roughly 8 hours of class per day
*   Classes still aim partly to prime people to have great conversations during meals/evenings
*   Almost everyone stays in a shared venue
*   Roughly 25[^zi2pks5k4ie] participants, and 12-ish staff and volunteers
*   Mostly small classes

“Honoring Who-ness”
===================

We added a new thread to our curriculum on working well with one’s own and other peoples’ “who-ness” (alternately: pride, ego, spark, self-ness, authorship).

What, you might ask, is “who-ness?”
-----------------------------------

Alas, we do not (yet?) have a technical concept near “who-ness.”[^23gzy66vrqu] However, we want to make room at the workshop for discussing some obvious phenomena that are hard to model if your map of humans is just “humans have beliefs and goals” and easier once we try talking about “who-ness.” These phenomena include:

a) Many of us humans feel good when someone notices a telling detail of a project we worked hard on -- especially if the detail is one we cared about, and *double* especially if they seem to see the generator behind that detail. After being affirmed in this way, we often have more energy (and especially energy for that particular generator).

b) We seem similarly nourished by working alongside competent others to accomplish difficult tasks that use our skills fully and deeply.

c) Much useful work seems to be bottlenecked more by psychological energy than by time and/or money.

d) When I (or most people) start a project, I often spend time booting up a local mental context that the project can proceed from, draw energy from, and… in some way, feed energy (as well as skills and context-bits) back into. This can happen on lots of scales, ranging from a few minutes to decades.

For example, consider a game of Go. Midway through a game of Go, I’ll have a bunch of active hopes and questions and fears, such as:

*   “Watch out; is he going to be able to pull some mischief in that corner?”
*   “That move I did there: was it actually needed? Did I waste an unnecessary stone? Watch to see how it pans out, maybe I’ll figure out if I needed it”
*   “Will I be able to \[...\]?”

These hopes/fears/questions are piecemeal, but they’re linked together into a single “mental context" such that I can easily notice when the balance of my attention should tug it from the bits that used to deserve my attention to the parts that deserve my attention now, and such that there’s a single mood and tempo permeating the whole thing.

There’s something sad about having to permanently interrupt a game of Go partway through (eg after a work call or something). In my terms, I might say that the “who-ness” that was booted up around the game is disbanded forcibly/suddenly, without getting to complete its loops and return its knowledge and energies into the larger system. The internal accounting gets disrupted.

Some other examples of "projects that stem from and help sustain their own particular mental context” include:

*   A particular stew I’m making for lunch
*   A longer-running project of learning to make stew across months
*   A particular friendship, spanning decades
*   Particular hobbies or vocations
*   My relationship to the city of Reno

Or, as yet another example: in our end-of-workshop survey, we asked our November workshop participants: “This is a weird question, but: who were you, when you were here? What did the workshop bring out in you? How does this differ from who you are, or what qualities get brought out in you, in your default life?”. And we got back coherent answers. So many of our participants probably experienced the workshop as a particular context, that helped summon, in them, a particular who-ness.  
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e) The “venue kittens” (CFAR has venue caretakers now, and they have kittens) were a delight to watch, and seemed to visibly have their own “who-ness”, which many of us instinctively cared about and enjoyed watching.[^oyz03t106rr]

Concrete components of our “honoring who-ness” thread
-----------------------------------------------------

Concretely, at our November workshop, we had:

*   A short opening session piece about “who-ness”
*   A Pride class by John Salvatier (handout [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1z6GvGFi3HsydcJmi5EZS1sY6CD4cdAZIaYB__CbWHC8/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.l5lrdyq13agz) if you want a partial idea)
*   A class on Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” called “Who-friending” (handout [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dEwvg6BZZg-VJf5y8gZbr7-c0U7oSUgROweAEsm_qRs/edit?tab=t.0))
*   A class on question substitution by Preston. This is classic heuristics-and-biases content from Kahneman,[^oldhzp04h7] yet Preston’s class used social examples to get people noticing how we mistake our heuristics about people for the people themselves. By noticing and scoring the heuristic questions they were using to judge others and then checking those judgments through direct conversation, participants could feel the difference between interacting with a model and encountering who-ness directly
*   Patternwork: a class taught by Jack, about noticing “rhymes” across situations where you reacted oddly strongly

Who-ness was also threaded through various parts of our classic classes, and we heard many instances of the word “who-ness” scattered through conversations in the hallways.

Classic CFAR content
====================

The current workshop keeps almost all the parts that were particularly good or notable from the classic CFAR curriculum:[^59olplf7nmt] Building a Bugs List; Inner Simulator; TAPs; Goal-factoring; Double Crux; Focusing; CoZE; Pair Debugging; Hamming Questions; Hamming Circles; Resolve Cycles.

This is all to say that there’s still a great deal of material and techniques on how to:

*   Have “beliefs” in the sense of predictions, not just words you say in your head; harvest knowledge from *what you expect to see happen*, and include it in your verbal beliefs
*   Tune into the “autopilot” that runs much of your life (including much of what you notice, or fail to notice, and so can/can’t consciously attend to); gradually train your autopilot to better suit your goals
*   Notice when your work feels “beside the point” in some way; get a better verbal handle on what that feeling in you implicitly believes the point *is*
*   Avoid calling a problem “impossible” until you’ve worked on it for at least five minutes by the clock

And so on.

Many of these classes have been changed in small ways to (we think) better interface with “who-ness” but the core of the classic CFAR workshop remains intact. If you send your friends to a [2026-era CFAR workshop](https://rationality.org/workshops/upcoming), we continue to bet[^w6fv6ae0l8] they’ll get the good skills/mindset/etc. that folks used to get, plus some new and exciting material as well.

[^zi2pks5k4ie]: CFAR kept it to 25 in our early years, then increased to 40 once the curriculum was stable; for now, we are again keeping it to 25. Small classes aid curriculum development. (Most classes at the workshop have about 8 guests.)  

[^23gzy66vrqu]: I do have a semi-technical concept I use in my head, which I'll sketch: I imagine the mind as an economy of tiny "mindlets", who gradually learn to form "businesses" that can tackle particular goals (such as "move hand"; "move hand toward rattle"; etc). On my model, a "who-ness" corresponds to a business made of mindlets; most of our learned skills are located in the "businesses" rather than the individual mindlets; and the validation we get from someone recognizing good work, or from ourselves seeing that we succeeded at something tricky and worthy, helps keep the businesses involved in that particular work from going bankrupt. See also Ayn Rand’s model of “living money”; and an upside of burnout. 

[^oyz03t106rr]:  

[^oldhzp04h7]: Unfortunately, there is no standard name for this, but it is eg discussed on Wikipedia, in this LW post by Kaj, and in Kahneman’s book “Thinking: Fast and Slow”.  

[^59olplf7nmt]: A notable exception is Internal Double Crux (IDC), which I think is often harmful for growing intact who-ness; CFAR stopped teaching at mainline workshops a bit before we paused workshop activity in 2020. 

[^w6fv6ae0l8]: We have a money-back guarantee for the workshop; the guarantee covers dissatisfaction for whatever reason, but "I expected classic content and didn't get it" is a fine reason. I'd also be happy to take an actual bet if someone wants.