The Inkhaven Residency
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20Austin Chen
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17Duncan Sabien (Inactive)
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12Declan Molony
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5Gordon Seidoh Worley
4Raemon
6Gordon Seidoh Worley
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4Collisteru
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2Épiphanie Gédéon
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New Comment
I think it's a nice initiative, and I'm curious to see the outputs.
Other people have built up a lot of ideas over time, or have developed a unique perspective they've not written up, and so have the potential to make every daily post great.
From my own attempts at shipping a lot of blogposts in a short time, I predict that this group of people will find it most useful: people who have piled up ideas, examples, thoughts, models, and who need a forcing function to shape them and share them.
Whereas I do not feel from experience that writing a lot of blogposts actually helps shaping completely new ideas, incubating models, and accreting enough pieces to get something big.
For an analogous reason, I expect most of the blogposts that come out of it to be simple stylistically (à la Classic Style). Regularly shipping without preexisting really good wordsmithing skill is not conductive to writing poetically or evocatively or really narratively in my experience.
So I guess one reason I'm curious about the results of this experiment is that I might update toward the benefits of shipping a lot of writing for what I really care about, which is building deeper models and writing beautiful prose.
while we're registering predictions: I predict that >70% of the value will come from the general environment and maybe peer feedback, rather than help from the mentors. I might update this if writing coaches were brought on board.
I'm not quite sure what Ben/Oli have in mind (I'm not very involved with this project so far). But:
I haven't successfully "wrote a Blogpost™" every day, during periods I didn't have pent up ideas (I haven't tried). But, I have done "do a lot of thinking/reading/ideating each day, and then, spend an hour writing it up explaining my thoughts to the Lightcone Team", and this basically was successfully in provoking a lot of thoughts I hadn't thought before, and the process of writing them up did further help crystallize them.
What you describe makes sense.
In my model, the problem with the bare "write and publish a lot" is that it pushes for optimizing legibility a lot. Which is good if you have already thought through stuff and need to express them cleanly, and less good if you are trying to actually come up with ideas.
The situation you describe lowers the pressure of legibility in two ways: by giving you more space during the day (this is mot writing a blogpost in an hour outside of work) and by having an audience that is much closer to you than the general online audience.
My experience is that, in trying to write, I find (to my surprise) that I have a lot of models and ideas built-up that I never realized could or should be written down, but that are worthwhile to do so. So I expect that to happen.
I think I am relatively more optimistic that, in a month devoted to writing, people will explore stylistically and be successful in those explorations. I wonder if we can take a (token) bet on something around this, to help ensure one of us updates after the event. For instance, about how many poetic or narratively-surprising posts by Inkhaven Residents get over 100 karma on LessWrong (i.e. as a proxy for "they were also good")?
My experience is that, in trying to write, I find (to my surprise) that I have a lot of models and ideas built-up that I never realized could or should be written down, but that are worthwhile to do so. So I expect that to happen.
Might definitely be the case. When I do that, I find that I have a lot of fragments, bits and pieces, and that they don't make a coherent whole. But might be just me.
I think I am relatively more optimistic that, in a month devoted to writing, people will explore stylistically and be successful in those explorations. I wonder if we can take a (token) bet on something around this, to help ensure one of us updates after the event. For instance, about how many poetic or narratively-surprising posts by Inkhaven Residents get over 100 karma on LessWrong (i.e. as a proxy for "they were also good")?
I'm fine with the token bet (like $10 or something), though one controlling factor which is not present in your proposal is whether the people where already really skilled at writing poetically or narratively. My claim is that I expect it won't help them get significantly better at these.
This looks awesome, congrats on announcing this! I would be extremely tempted myself were it not for a bunch of other likely obligations. Approximately how large do you expect this fellowship to be?
Also, structuring Inkhaven as a paid program was interesting; most fellowships (eg Asterisk, FLF, MATS) instead pay their participants. I wonder if this introduces minor adverse selection, in that only writers who are otherwise financially stable can afford to participate. Famously, startup incubators that charge (like OnDeck) are much worse than incubators that pay for equity (like YC or hf0).
I imagine you've thought about this a lot already, and you do offer need-based scholarships which is great; also things like LessOnline and Manifest have proven some amount of success for charging for events. But maybe there's some other way of finding sponsors or funders for these writers? For example, I think Manifund would be quite happy to sponsor 1-3 "full rides" at $5k+ each, for a few bloggers who are interested in topics like AI safety funding, impact evaluations, and new opportunities, which we could occasionally crosspost to the Manifund newsletter. And I imagine other orgs like GGI might be too!
130 people is the aim!
I think the main disanalogy with startup incubators is that we're not necessarily betting for successful bloggers to increase their earning power; probably the modal respondent (given the community skews tech) can currently make as much money as a top 1% blogger already (though to be clear not necessarily a top .1% blogger).
I think the analogy that's better is to a meditation retreat or athletic conditioning program, or something, which afaict do pretty often charge (or at least have a strongly suggested donation in the meditation case); part of the point of charging (other than the obvious reason of just paying for stuff) is to make sure people are really bought-in/personally motivated to get the most out of it possible.
(I am helping with this event, but I don't speak for Ben here)
1Tangent: I was curious about your estimates of the top 1% and top 0.1% figures - so I looked into it. Somewhat also thinking about Erik Hoel's essay about successful authors being about as rare as billionaires. [link]
- Some estimate ~45 Substacks at >$1M/y [link] - that roughly fits with Substack's reported total subscription revenue at ~$450M/y. (Officially reported at 30 in 2024 [link])
- Reasonable to estimate 100-1000 Substacks at >$100k/y
- How many "bloggers" exist?
- Substack reports 50,000 Substacks w/ at least one paid sub [link]
- Very closely supports your 0.1% and 1% estimates TBH!
- There are about ~500M wordpress blogs on the Internet (???)
- I'm not sure what the right vibe is here: I could buy anything from 50,000 to 5M.
- Substack reports 50,000 Substacks w/ at least one paid sub [link]
- There's good numbers from Substack: this probably gets a lot weirder off-Substack.
- It does seem reasonable to say that "of Substackers that get to their first paid subscription, 1% get to ~$100k/y, and 0.1% get to ~$1M/y"
- There might still be some other weirdness here ~ top Substacks often look not that much like blogs.
This looks awesome, congrats on announcing this! I would be extremely tempted myself were it not for a bunch of other likely obligations.
Thank you Austin. I would certainly want to read a blog of yours after a month of daily writing :)
Approximately how large do you expect this fellowship to be?
I have so far been thinking of this as for 30-50 people. That's what I'm aiming for.
Also, structuring Inkhaven as a paid program was interesting; most fellowships (eg Asterisk, FLF, MATS) instead pay their participants. I wonder if this introduces minor adverse selection, in that only writers who are otherwise financially stable can afford to participate. Famously, startup incubators that charge (like OnDeck) are much worse than incubators that pay for equity (like YC or hf0).
Requiring people to pay for things is minor adverse selection on wealth. It is also has a much more direct feedback loop of the client being the person who uses the service, in contrast with being paid to use the service, and that feels broadly healthy to me.
(If there were a good analogue for equity in the blogging world I would definitely take that option; so far I have been involved in one serious trade for impact equity and I have not felt very keen to try it again.)
I imagine you've thought about this a lot already, and you do offer need-based scholarships which is great; also things like LessOnline and Manifest have proven some amount of success for charging for events. But maybe there's some other way of finding sponsors or funders for these writers? For example, I think Manifund would be quite happy to sponsor 1-3 "full rides" at $5k+ each, for a few bloggers who are interested in topics like AI safety funding, impact evaluations, and new opportunities, which we could occasionally crosspost to the Manifund newsletter. And I imagine other orgs like GGI might be too!
Yes, I'd love to explore sponsorships! We have just now added a question to the application for potential residents to let us know if they're happy for us to share their applications with potential sponsors, and I'd love to share applications with you guys at Manifund as they start to come in (we've already got one that I think could be a good fit for your interests). If anyone else reading this is interested in helping cover the costs of a potential next great internet writer like the advisors, please just drop me a line at inkhaven@lightconeinfrastructure.com (or any channel that's easy for you) and I'll get back to you about options.
(As to why not: the bottleneck so far has been time. Since I've been working on this I've prioritized launching so that people can plan for their whole November to be free, which is just 3 months away, and so haven't yet reached out to potential sponsors, but I'd like to do this after we've made sure to get the word out that the event even exists.)
1Just noting that when LW 2.0 revived, I did this on my own for a month, writing under the pseudonym Conor Moreton. I was already somewhat accomplished as a writer, but I can affirm that it was nevertheless an extremely useful exercise on multiple axes. If you're sitting there being, like, "ah, sounds pretty cool, shame I can't do it for [reason]," maybe pause and do some goal factoring and see if you can't get around [reason].
1And what great writing you did in that month! "Focusing," for skeptics. was (at least at the time) by far the best post about that technique.
I hereby propose that this song by Marc Rebillet be the official anthem of Inkhaven (especially the spoken word part in the middle of the song) :)
1Great to see you doing this! I would be happy to see more good writers, and even if I personally don't end up reading them, writing helps people think.
One post per day sounds too much for me. That's not to say that you shouldn't do this: I mean this literally that it sounds too much for me personally to try, but clearly there are people (like Eliezer and Duncan) who have had very good results doing it. And probably the people who'd try this are selected for being the kinds of people that it might work for.
The reason why I'm bringing this up is that it's easy for a certain type of person to look at this, go "oh if I want to be a serious writer then I should manage to hit once per day", and become demotivated when they fail. Or, they might seemingly succeed and burn out from writing.
You mention NaNoWriMo, which I used to do in my late teens. At one point doing Nano had the consequence that after going through that ordeal, I didn't want to do any fiction writing anymore for a long time, the experience had been so bad. (I forget if I hit or failed to hit 50K words on that particular year, but a consequence of the "quantity over quality" mindset was that hitting it often didn't feel particularly satisfying even on the years when I managed it. Even if it did occasionally give me some so-bad-it's-funny anecdotes to share.)
For the last month or so I've been trying to get to regular blogging and found that a pace of one article a week seems to work quite well for me. I might outline an essay in one day, work on it for a couple of more days, then feel that it's essentially finished and feel impatient to post it... but then hold off on posting it because I want to pace myself, and then a couple of days later think of various improvements to it that make me happy that I didn't post it earlier.
I expect that some of the people reading this comment will benefit immensely from the residency and being told "hey you can do more than you think, see what happens if you write a post a day". At the same time, I also expect that some other readers would benefit from being told "it's fine to do just one post a week or even one post a month, even that is still vastly more often than what anyone else produces".
Unfortunately I don't have a good way to tell who should take which kind of advice. But maybe they could be combined into something like "if you've never tried anything like this, then do give it a serious shot and try to honestly write a post a day, and also remember that you shouldn't stake your self-worth or identity as a writer on it, and that you can also try a slower pace later if that feels better".
21Overall, I don't expect most essays from Inkhaven Residents to be posted on LessWrong.
As a person whose preferred way of interacting with LessWrong is the All Posts page, this still sounds like potentially way too much volume! There's a real risk this will temporarily break the ability of me and other people to at least read the title of everything posted on LessWrong (and I have, to the best of my knowledge, read at least once the title of literally every post on LessWrong).
Assuming that over time LessWrong grows in popularity, what's your preferred longterm way to deal with this? (we could make different choices about this particular month, but I don't think it's really a workable longterm solution for people to read every post title on LW, and I'm not sure if All Posts Folk™ have a preference here other than just hoping LessWrong never gets that large.)
1It's a good question to think about.
My real preference is that LessWrong doesn't grow too much in popularity, or at least doesn't grow a lot in terms of number of people posting and commenting, even if it grows in terms of influence. I'm already bummed that LessWrong got so big that I could no longer read every post (or at least skim every post), which is what I was able to do up until maybe 2019 or 2020 when post volume went up (my memory is hazy here, but there was definitely some point after the 2.0 relaunch that post volumes got high enough I was forced to abandon opening every post). At some point LessWrong stops being LessWrong if it's no longer at least kind of a single community (this sort of already happened with EAF, which I'm bummed to see got worse for me in various ways over time as EA widened the tent and became less dominated by rationalist norms).
I don't know how much that's in the cards, and is probably not up to any of us. I like that LessWrong has relatively strong norms and is something like a closed community that welcomes visitors: anyone can come for the day, but if you want to live here you have to commit yourself to a certain lifestyle. I'm perhaps pushing the metaphor too far here, but it's like living in a village where everyone has to agree to do this one weird thing, and anyone can visit, but you can only stay if you do the one weird thing, and most people can't or don't want to do that thing and so are kept out.
If LessWrong got big in some way, then I'd at least like some way to maintain that small feeling. This is hard to think about how to do it because the easy option is some kind of karma filter, but this makes it hard for new people who should be part of "core" LW without having to come up through some other process of farming karma that might optimize for something other than what is good about the core of LW. Maybe some combo of karma and votes and time discounting (but then maybe people like me who post lots of controversial things would fall out of the core, which some people might like but I wouldn't)? I'm not really sure what the right solution is here to maintain something that looks like "LessWrong is all one community" and "LessWrong has more stuff on it than can fit in one community".
Of course this specific event will also be short lived, and I've survived previous times of temporary high volume. Hopefully it will be offset by the quality of the posts (although part of me hopes they suck just because I only have so much time in the day to read great blog posts!).
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Hey there, this is such a neat opportunity! Would you mind confirming that my application was sent? I didn't get an email. Mine was the application that links to https://collisteru.net and was sent today.
I feel I would benefit immeasurably from this. Unfortunately, I’m not in California so this wouldn’t be feasible for me. Nor do I have enough post Karma to meet your standards.
The challenge of writing 30 blog posts in 30 days is exactly the kind of thing that excites me and in a pique of inspiration I’ve already written 23 post ideas. That alone has been surprisingly difficult. I would have expected I could easily generate 30 ideas. So already I have to measure my expectations. How much harder will writing the posts themselves be? How else will I be surprised.
The clincher for me was that Scott Alexander quote:
"Whenever I see a new person who blogs every day, it's very rare that that never goes anywhere or they don't get good. That's like my best leading indicator for who's going to be a good blogger."
Seeing as how I won’t be able to join this residency or enjoy the mentorship and feedback – I’m wondering out aloud here: what else needs to be in place for that quote to ring true? (Aside from obviously rewrite, rewrite, and rewrite each post again). What rules should I impose on myself? What advice can I action? What factors do I need to control to maximize my chances of becoming a better writer by the end of the month?
If you want to get better, what you need to do can be summed up in a single word: write.
Anything beyond that depends on exactly what type of writer you want to be, so I'd need to know more specifics. Reading very frequently helps too in my experience.
If you want to get better, what you need to do can be summed up in a single word: write.
If the answer was writing more, then I'd be already be a great writer. I'm not. I write everyday but it's meandering nonsense.
So clearly just writing isn't enough, but what is enough?
Anything beyond that depends on exactly what type of writer you want to be, so I'd need to know more specifics.
Two things: 1. responding to emails and text messages promptly and without ambiguity in any situation, business, organizing date night, catching up with friends, giving friends advice or counsel, 2. making online content which advertises my skills as a video maker - so basically writing scripts for videos which are easy to say, engaging, concise, advertise my skills, but also can get picked up by the algo (instagram, youtube, or tiktok).
Hi, thanks for organizing this!
Sorry if I missed this somewhere, is there a deadline for when to apply? I'm thinking that if I want to apply (especially for the scholarship), then it makes more sense for me to first write up one-two lesswrong post to demonstrate potential a bit more, but I wouldn't want it to make me miss the date.
Thanks a lot!
Very cool opportunity! I've been following the Astral Codex Ten substack for a while and would love to be part of the program. Would you confirm if the application has been received? It's linked to my medium account: https://medium.com/@sonias17. Thanks!
It appears you're doing what amounts to "rolling applications," where you make a decision on each application about 10 days after it's submitted. You might want to publish your list of accepted applicants here as they are admitted.
NOTE: Of course, that's with permission. You probably want to have a thoughtful conversation with each applicant about if they want to be published to this, (and under what name or pseudonym) given that anonymous online writing is deeply tied to the norms & history of the community.. and this would break the IRL/online identity separation.
Is there a Lighthaven events calendar or newsletter which I can sign up to to hear about these kind of things – all the rationalist-and-adjacent events, conferences and residencies you host?
Every now and again I hear about stuff via word of mouth or stumbling on a post like this but it’s unreliable and sometimes too late.
IMO it makes sens for an event venue to not list the events it's hosting, especially when they're run by orgs unaffiliated with Lightcone Infrastructure. I expect Vitalist Bay organizers to not want to be straightforwardly associated with all the other events running at Lighthaven.
AFAIK most events running at Lighthaven related to the rationalist community are advertised on LessWrong. See the Lighthaven tag for some examples.
FYI the "Which of the following describe you" question in the "Be a contributor to the Inkhaven Residency" application says "Can select... none!" but the form requires you to select at least one to submit.
Thank you! Fixed now.
(Just for redundancy, I'll clarify that was in the Contributor form, not the Resident application form.)
