Rationality for Entrepreneurs: Awesome workshop in the Bay Area | Hacker News Reader

Rationality for Entrepreneurs: Awesome workshop in the Bay Area

appliedrationality.org

78 pointskf17 comments

I went to their earlier workshop in July. I think it was probably the most useful week of my life in terms of exposure to things I could be doing to be more productive.

Since attending, I've been getting considerably more work done (my brother has noticed too). Anna Salamon's class on fungability prompted me to change the direction of one of our businesses. Plus, the CFAR people are just fun to be around!

Anna Salamon wrote an article on LessWrong, "Humans are not automatically strategic," which changed my life:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2p5/humans_are_not_automatically_str...

I wrote a bit about it 2 weeks ago here on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4702484

I attended their May workshop. It was exceptional and it seems like they have improved on the format since. If you are the sort of person who is interested in such things it is probably worth your time and money. (Or you can just value it as a highly interesting and fun vacation.)

If you're in the Bay Area you might want to beta test the quality of the instruction for free at their Berkeley headquarters; they often have workshops in the evenings there. The next is on Thursday. If you sign up for the newsletter on their site you'll get notified.

I went to one of their minicamps and learned some amazing mental tools like fungibility, environment design, and Bayes law.

I know Geoff Anders, who is teaching a few of the sessions, and he is awesome. I live in NY and don't have time to fly out for this, but would be very interested if I lived out there.

I second Geoff Anders being awesome. leverageresearch.org doesn't do Leverage Research (his org) justice, but there's plenty of interest there anyway.

I went to their July "minicamp", which was an awesome experience.

I'll be there.

Sadly, I don't have $3,900 to shell out. It would be wonderful if there was a similar workshop that was more openly accessible.

Ask about a scholarship

Do you know how the scholarship is income-dependent? Because, obviously, my parents could afford it (I'm on a gap year(s) out of high school), but I personally could not (working at a startup).

Hi Brian, I'm the president of CFAR; we still have some scholarship money left so I'd encourage you to fill out the (short) application form today. If you're a great fit for the workshop, we can figure out a price that works.

Do this, it will work. The price is fungible if it needs to be.

This reminds me of a quip in a New York Times article about Amazon's exclusive book, Timothy Ferriss’s “The 4-Hour Chef:"

Those books about finding success without trying too hard were a particular hit with young men, who identified with their quasi-scientific entrepreneurial spirit.

The schedule reads like a table of contents from a self-help book. That could be a good thing.

I'm just surprised how much traction lifestyle instruction gets with an unlikely demographic: 18-24 year old men with access to unlimited concrete learning materials online.

Is there a way to read up on the things taught in the workshop in particular on the more applied/practical material?

Please correct the title - Entrepeurs is a pretty unflattering misspelling

Is there going to be an east coast version in the future?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com