The Open Philanthropy Project awarded a grant of $1,035,000 over two years to the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR). This is one of a small number of grants that Open Philanthropy expects to make in 2016 to support organizations within the effective altruism community, as it wrote in its plan for 2016.
CFAR is an organization that runs workshops aimed at helping participants avoid known cognitive biases, form better mental habits, and thereby make better decisions. CFAR is particularly interested in growing the talent pipeline for work on potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence, a focus area of the Open Philanthropy Project.
$915,000 of this grant will support CFAR workshops and organizational improvements. $120,000 of this grant will fund a pilot version of EuroSPARC, an eight-day summer program in Europe run by CFAR for mathematically gifted high school students, modeled on the San Francisco-based Summer Program in Applied Rationality and Cognition (SPARC), which CFAR has helped run for the past three years. We previously made a separate grant to support SPARC’s operations in the U.S.