Center for Applied Rationality

The Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) is a nonprofit founded in 2012 in Berkeley, California, as a spin-off of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), created to teach the reasoning techniques developed in the Rationalist Community through paid residential workshops. Its founders came from the MIRI orbit and included Anna Salamon and Julia Galef. CFAR shared personnel, premises, and an Effective Altruism donor base with MIRI, and its workshops functioned as a recruitment funnel that drew talented young people toward artificial-intelligence-safety work and the broader rationalist milieu.¹²

Workshops and the AI-Safety Funnel

CFAR ran multi-day workshops teaching "applied rationality," a curriculum of decision-making, debiasing, and emotional-processing techniques. The founding instructor group, beyond Salamon and Galef, included Valentine Smith and the AI-safety researcher Andrew Critch, and the organization began offering classes in 2012. A standard residential workshop ran four and a half days at a fee of 3,900 dollars, with scholarships and a free preliminary consultation; Galef served as president until 2016, when Salamon, who had come from MIRI, succeeded her. CFAR and MIRI shared offices in Berkeley.⁶⁷

The organization openly oriented its later programming toward AI-risk recruitment, holding specialized workshops, including dedicated "AI Risk for Computer Scientists" sessions run jointly with MIRI, to identify and route promising participants toward existential-risk work. The workshops, the group houses, and the annual alumni reunions formed the in-person spine of the Bay Area rationalist community during the 2010s. The curriculum borrowed from cognitive-behavioral therapy, debiasing research, and the community's own techniques such as "double crux" and "internal double crux," and the residential format placed instructors and participants in extended close contact that several later first-person accounts identified as a vector for the high-control dynamics that developed in the milieu.²⁶

The Zizian Protest and the Abuse Accounts

In November 2019 the group around Jack LaSota that became the Zizians protested a CFAR alumni reunion in Sonoma County, appearing in masks and robes, blocking the entrances, and accusing the organization of covering up misconduct. Four protesters were arrested.³

In 2021 a first-person account titled "My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR" circulated on LessWrong alongside Zoe Curzi's parallel writeup of Leverage Research, describing psychological harm, high-control dynamics, and breakdowns in the MIRI and CFAR environment. A 2023 Bloomberg investigation gathered further accounts of abuse and coercion across the rationalist organizations. CFAR wound down its regular public workshop schedule around the start of the 2020s.⁴⁵