Center for Applied Rationality

The Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in Berkeley, California, dedicated to developing and teaching techniques for clearer thinking and better decision-making. Its tagline is "The examined life. Via trial and error." CFAR was founded in 2012 by Julia Galef, Anna Salamon, Michael "Valentine" Smith, and Andrew Critch. The organization originated as an extension of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), with the goal of improving participants' rationality using techniques drawn from mathematics, decision theory, psychology, and behavioral economics. From 2012 through early 2020, CFAR ran approximately 60 immersive 4.5-day workshops, building an alumni community of over 1,300 people. Workshop curricula covered techniques such as Inner Simulator, Trigger-Action Planning (TAPs), Goal Factoring, Double Crux, Focusing, Resolve Cycles, Comfort Zone Expansion (CoZE), and Hamming Questions. Workshops typically included around 25 participants with about 10 instructors, and achieved an average satisfaction rating of 9.2 out of 10. In 2018, CFAR purchased a permanent venue in Bodega Bay, California -- a former bed and breakfast called the Bay Hill Mansion -- with an $800,000 down payment grant from the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI). This significantly reduced their venue costs compared to previous rental arrangements. After the onset of COVID-19 in 2020, CFAR entered a roughly five-year period of reduced operations. During this hiatus, the organization quietly regrouped and reassessed its approach. In 2025, under the leadership of President Anna Salamon, CFAR renewed operations and began running pilot workshops in Austin, Texas, and San Francisco, featuring a roughly 50/50 mix of classic CFAR content and newer experimental material. CFAR also fiscally sponsors SPARC (Summer Program on Applied Rationality and Cognition), a free two-week summer program for approximately 30 mathematically gifted high school students, covering probability, game theory, information theory, cognitive biases, and microeconomics. The organization currently operates with a lean team of approximately eight part-time curriculum developers and instructors, and has expressed a desire to be known as "a Center for Applied Rationality" rather than "the Center for Applied Rationality," reflecting its intention not to be the sole canonical locus for rationality training.