In the Summer of 2015, I pretended to be sick for my school's prom and graduation, so that I could instead fly out to San Francisco to attend a workshop by the Center for Applied Rationality.

It was a life-changing experience. I met a community of people who I'd invest my life energy into; I began to believe in myself due to encouragement from Logan Strohl; I became friends with Oliver Habryka, a relationship that would be core to the rest of my life/career; and I started to focus my intentions and powers into understanding myself and sorting out my motivations and epistemic processes. I extended my stay for a full two weeks. During this period, I was surrounded by geniuses, idealists, crazies, autists, pure-of-heart people, one or two people who want to dominate people, and a lot of people with a lot of blindspots.

At the CFAR workshop, I journaled extensively each night.

I have never read that journal.

I am reading it for the first time today, and posting it fully in the appendix of this post.

In this post I'll highlight a few quotes and comment on the overall experience.

Rationality Techniques

'Goal Factoring' with [...]

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Outline:

(01:19 ) Rationality Techniques

(03:16 ) Learning things about my motivations

(04:43 ) Gratitude

(05:19 ) Status

(05:31 ) My Takeaways

(07:42 ) The rest of my stay in the rationalist bay area

(10:19 ) Appendix

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:

November 21st, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ADuPkFMnkQTAY99Hy/reading-my-diary-10-years-since-cfar

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.