If you've liked my previous writings, you might want to follow what I write during Inkhaven. You can do so by going to my blog^[1] and clicking the Subscribe button in the lower right corner.

If you haven't heard of Inkhaven, it's this writing retreat, happening during all of November. Residents have committed to writing a blog post every day. This is a lot of posts! So I don't currently plan to post most of mine on LessWrong. I might post a few that I think are especially good. But I also expect lots of other residents to be doing that, and so there'll likely be noticeably more post volume on LessWrong during November.

On LessWrong I've mostly written about AI, agent foundations and math. During Inkhaven I expect to mostly write about other things! You can see what kind of things I might write about instead by checking out said blog, or my space blog.^[2]

I'm a bit nervous about whether I'll be able to output reasonable posts every single day while also responsibly fulfilling the duties of my "day job" running the Dovetail fellowship. In the past I have tried to do NaNoWriMo multiple times, including when unemployed, and never got close. A couple months ago I did a "test run" to see what it felt like to output one post per day. These were the posts that came out of that test run;

• ChatGPT is the Daguerreotype of AI
• Should you make stone tools?
• Somebody invented a better bookmark
• The Inheritors: a book review
• Agent foundations: not really math, not really science

I think it went pretty well, but it sure did take up some time. The Daguerreotype post took an entire day.^[3]

I think there's a different framing that I'm going to have to adopt, which is something like: Say ONE thing. If you have more to say about that thing, say it in tomorrow's blog post.

Much of my source of meaning in life comes from deeply understanding things and organizing the content of that understanding in the best way possible. Often when I write, the whole thing I am doing is trying to lay out that synthesized understanding for the reader.

This can be extremely valuable, but I think it is effectively equivalent to writing a book. It would be nice to write a book at some point in my life, but I should probably gain a more robust skill of actually publishing things first.

I have certainly been aware of this problem for a long time, and so the posts I do end up writing are already making huge compromises and breaking off a small chunk. That can go really well, but what happens almost all of the time is that I give up and wander away, and never publish what I've written down.

I know that there exists a totally different way of writing, because I've seen other people doing it. It involves publishing very frequently, saying what's alive for you in that moment, and just relinquishing loose threads. It involves perceiving yourself as part of a dynamic, complicated system, where it's more important for people to hear what you're thinking now than for your thoughts to be comprehensively transcribed. In many cases, I believe this method produces far more total volume and even quality than the first one, and thus far more value for the world.

So that's probably what I'll have to practice to succeed at Inkhaven. Wish me luck.

1. ^{^}

   "Huh, Alex has a blog? I had no idea." Yeah, I've never bothered to promote it. Which is related to the fact that it has checks notes 15 posts across 11 years. I do like them all, though.

2. ^{^}

   Which is inactive, because my space special interest has tapered off.

3. ^{^}

   And it was the least popular, perhaps because the word "Daguerreotype" looked like random noise and people's eyes skipped over it.