(This post is part of a sequence of year-end efforts to invite real conversation about CFAR; you’ll find more about our workshops, as well as our fundraiser, at What's going on at CFAR? Updates and Fundraiser and at More details on CFAR's new workshops)

In part of that post, we discuss the main thing that bothered me about our past workshop and why I think it is probably fixed now (though we’re still keeping an eye out). Here, I list the biggest remaining known troubles with our workshops and our other major workshop-related todo items.

Your thoughts as to what's really up with these and how to potentially address them (or what cheap investigations might get us useful info) are most welcome.

Ambiguous impact on health

(Current status: ?)

In the 2012-2020 workshops, our “CFAR techniques” seemed to help people do 5-minute-timer or insight-based things, but seemed to some of us to make it harder, or at least not easier, to eg:

Get physical exercise
Learn slow and unglamorous things from textbooks across an extended time[1]
Be happy and hard-working at a day job in a slow and stable way

This seems unfortunate.

I’m mildly hopeful the changes [...]

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Outline:

(00:50) Ambiguous impact on health

(02:18) Unclear mechanism of action; lack of piecewise checkability

(04:00) Habits that make it easier for alumni to get pulled into cults

(05:23) Outward-directedness

(05:44) More things I want for the workshops

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
December 29th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/77L6wyZqibxdGKd6e/cfar-s-todo-list-re-our-workshops

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“CFAR’s todo list re: our workshops” by AnnaSalamon

LessWrong (30+ Karma)