Isegoria

As self-help workshops go, the Center for Applied Rationality’s is not especially accessible:

CFAR has been offering workshops since 2012, but it doesn’t typically advertise its classes. People tend to hear about the group from co-workers (usually at tech companies) or through a blog called LessWrong, associated with the artificial-intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is also the author of the popular fan-fiction novel ‘‘Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.’’ (Yudkowsky founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), which provided the original funding for CFAR; the two groups share an office space in Berkeley.) Yudkowsky is a controversial figure. Mostly self-taught — he left school after eighth grade — he has written openly about polyamory and blogged at length about the threat of a civilization-ending A.I. Despite this, CFAR’s sessions have become popular. According to Galef, Facebook hired the group to teach a workshop, and the Thiel Fellowship invited CFAR to teach several classes at its annual meeting. Jaan Tallinn, who helped create Skype, recently began paying for math and science students to attend CFAR meetings.

This is all the more surprising given that the workshops, which cost $3,900 per person, are run like a college-dorm cram session. Participants stay on-site for the entire time (typically four days and nights), often in bargain-basement conditions. In San Leandro, the organizers packed 48 people (36 participants, plus six staff members and six volunteers) into a single house, using twin mattresses scattered on the floor as extra beds. In the kitchen, I asked Matt O’Brien, a 30-year-old product manager who develops brain-training software for Lumosity, whether he minded the close quarters. He looked briefly puzzled, then explained that he already lives with 20 housemates in a shared house in San Francisco. Looking around the chaotic kitchen, he shrugged and said, ‘‘It’s not really all that different.’’

Those constraints produced a peculiar homogeneity. Nearly all the participants were in their early- to mid-20s, with quirky bios of the Bay Area variety. (‘‘Asher is a singing, freestyle rapping, former international Quidditch All-American turned software engineer.’’) Communication styles tended toward the formal. When I excused myself from one conversation, my interlocutor said, ‘‘I will allow you to disengage,’’ then gave a courtly bow. The only older attendee, a man in his 50s who described himself as polyamorous and ‘‘part Vulcan,’’ ghosted through the workshop, padding silently around the house in shorts and a polo shirt.

If the demographics of the workshop were alarmingly narrow, there was no disputing the group’s studiousness. Over the course of four days, I heard not a single scrap of chatter about anything unrelated to rationality. Nor, so far as I could discern, did anybody ever leave the house. Not for a quick trip to the Starbucks a mile down the road. Not for a walk in the sprawling park a half-mile away. One participant, Phoenix Eliot, had recently moved into a shared house where everyone was a ‘‘practicing rationalist’’ and reported that the experience had been positive. ‘‘We haven’t really had any interpersonal problems,’’ Eliot told me. ‘‘Whereas if this were a regular house, with people who just like each other, I think there would have been a lot more issues.’’

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