Doublehaven remains unaffiliated with Inkhaven

1. Cruel April

Two posts per day, for fifteen days. Breeding posts from the dead earth of my drafts, and the recesses of my mind. I would guess a little over twenty thousand words. It was not difficult, just costly. Writing takes time, and time is precious. I had to spend a lot of time writing this month.

On day three I forgot I’d already posted twice!

On day four I prepped one for day five (I did not prep much again)

On day five, I took a trip to Suffolk, in the East of England. The place is beautiful. I hoped to write a poem on the beauty of the place. Instead I wrote a half-formed thing on nuclear power plants.

On day six I pulled a draft and edited it.

On day seven I did that twice.

On day eight, I was back from Suffolk, but out of drafts.

On day nine I felt my motivation rather drained: I’d written half a post before I though to check with Claude whether that path was trodden. It was.

On day ten, my second post was not one I was proud of. What a shame. The first one was a post I did like, though.

On day eleven I hit a rhythm, the first post slid out easily—or so I thought! the second one did not. I had to pull a story from my drafts (for what would be the final time).

On day twelve I was feeling rather rough (in my defence the previous day had been rather unfortunate). Ironic

On day fourteen I was worried about many things, but writing was not one. My flight to San Francisco was cancelled, and re-routed through LAX. I would be landing late, and reaching my motel even later, now. I worried that it might close up before I got to it. I posted twice from LAX, in a dingy lounge.

2. The Waste Land

I arrive in The Bay, for the first time. I had not slept for twenty-two hours when I landed at San Francisco Airport. My motel check-in waited for me. This sadly robbed me of a truly authentic Bay Area authenticity: being homeless.

Some places feel unreal. The Bay is the opposite, it feels more real than the rest of the world. I am the fake one, here. A score of signs for AI loom over the freeway (as Phoebe Bridgers wrote “The billboard said the end is near”).

It is no wonder start-ups work in The Bay. Zero to one. Turning the unreal into the real. This place could make a man go mad, and it does.

The buildings are arrayed in an endless grid, broken where the hills push up out of the earth. Some of the flat ground is landfill: The Bay was shrunk by half when it was filled with refuse.

The people here sound strange; so do the crows. The roads are strange; too wide, like butter spread on too much toast. The houses are too pretty, also too disorganised.

I am an Englishman. America was our dumping ground: Quakers, Puritans, Cavaliers and Reavers. Four strands of unwanted debris, sorted and woven across a continent. Now they are realer than us. They found their way to The Bay.

To them, we are a fiction, like The Shire.

3. On Words and Writing

I have written so many words. Words are weird. You only notice this when you spend enough time in un-wordy settings; maths and computer science. Even then, you only really get the weirdness once you come back and spend a lot of time with words.

Borges noticed the weirdness, and he manipulated the weirdness. That was his whole style. I am not as good a writer as Borges, but I can write rather fast.

Two of the fictions I published were centred on words: Julian Skies is a fanfiction of another story, and it was also a particular attempt to put a huge number of references into a single piece. Tigers is a kind of funny concept, which I don’t actually expect anyone to understand having read it: what would it look like for some post-quasi-apocalyptic setting to have a weird anti-inductive predator ecosystem, where behaving “rationally” makes you more likely to be killed. It’s also a completely batshit insane kind-of-retelling for a book called Ridley Walker, which is set in a post-apocalyptic Kent. Mine is set in a post apocalyptic … somewhere, at least somewhere a particular billionaire had an end-of-the-world bunker.

Words are human-shaped, and they tend to fit very well in the easily-accessible, low-effort parts of our minds. If you want to actually think about things, you need to exert effort to think in something other than words. Then you need to translate that into and out of words. Words can smooth over bad reasoning, and mimic logic, as I wrote in Beware Natural Language Logic. They can make things sound sensible while being nonsense, which is kind of like what I was getting at in Beware Even Small Amounts of Woo.

Words can make something that feels realer than the reality around us. That’s what I wrote about in A Fictional Dialogue with an Absent Stranger. The real world, when we try to understand it, comes out all wrong on an emotional level: we live in a society. We did not evolve in a society. The split between how things feel they should be and how things are is painful.

I didn’t plan for so many of my random writings to come together in this way, I just think I lack the ability to make them varied enough to be unconnected even if I tried!

Strange coincidences too. That post I wrote in a hurry, Morale, about the importance of being rewarded for your efforts, and discussed the difference between random-sparse and regular rewards? It was rewarded, by being LessWrong curated. The rewards from writing are random-sparse. Or maybe it was overdetermined that in thirty posts I’d get curated. That’s about my base rate, so maybe the rewards are regular. Depends on what you count the unit of effort to be. Two curated posts a month would be quite impressive.

A sadder coincidence: the thing I wrote about Chocolate Sloths, Tinder, and Moral Backstops was mostly motivated by my experiences dating, the rest was fluff. The day after I wrote it, one of my partners (who I met through in-person friends) broke up with me, and did so extremely nicely and respectfully, just as the post predicted! (Still sad though) The 155 gram chocolate sloth was looking rather nervous (as much as a chocolate sloth can) when I got home, but no, I did not eat it all that day. It survived until the stress of the flight cancellation.

Song-writing, and by subset, writing, is something I wish I were better at. And I’m empirically pretty good. In Reaching One’s Limits I discussed my piano playing. There are two hundred professional pianists in the world. I am probably one in ten thousand, when it comes to piano skills. One in ten thousand height means 6’8”. One in ten thousand piano playing is, essentially, worthless when it comes to employment. I sometimes feel the same way about writing. I am good, but it remains and will remain a hobby.

Over a year ago, I tried to write a short story. Nobody read it, but it wasn’t for them. All writing is for the author: this is one conclusion I take from my writing. It was called Look at the Water and it was a rationalist-themed retelling of The Satanic Verses, about being a stranded rationalist, far from the community. I will be stranded no longer.

4. A Broken Piece of Poetry

Look out to sea: a steel frame! Atop it nest the kittiwake
And gorge themselves on sandeels as the reed-bed bitterns boom.
They claim the marshes with their song, instruct our power-plants to make
The smallest blemish on the earth, and leave the rest to bloom.

Elsewhere, another complex stands all garlanded with razor wire.
A black redstart takes jester's privilege inside the court
And in the patch of water heated by the hearth's atomic fire,
Ten score of gulls keep warm, waiting for audience with wrought iron.

One day ... may ptarmigans sing, and capercailie fight,
Atop a grave two dozen meters wide, a mile deep.
A surgeon's cut into the bedrock, to hide our debris.

My wishes for the flourishing of man, and beast, and flower,
Once tugged in all directions, as to pull my soul apart.
But now we need no oil, no coal, no smokestacks for our power:
Now we may split the atom, mend my heart.

5. Dear Oliver Habryka, I Am Inside Your Haven

It is day fifteen now.

I am not just in The Bay to see The Bay. In a few days I have a conference at LightHaven. I owe LightCone immensely: without LessWrong I would not have a career in AI safety. My LessWrong posts were a major factor in me getting to be able to research AI alignment at all.

For the three nights of the conference, I will be staying at the venue, but because of Inkhaven I was unable to book my chosen pod for the three nights preceeding my steay. For weeks since then I have felt an irresistible urge to sneak my way in, and post my final post from inside out of spite.

I have pulled off this smuggling operation. I am within the walls of the Haven.^[1] I declare Doublehaven to be complete! To my fellow posters: may your keystrokes flow like ale on an August afternoon.

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1. ^{^}

   Done through entirely non-nefarious means!