We'll also be getting more time with Scott Alexander this time around. He'll be hosting frequent office hours throughout the whole program. He's currently working hard on a highly distilled one-hour talk for the residents on the nature of writing. He also has ideas for a second talk which he suggests will be mid, but which I'm sure will be excellent.
At the tail end of plzdontkillus, I was told that Ben Pace was leaning against running Inkhaven 3 in order to direct his energies toward new projects. This saddened me, because I believe Inkhaven is a magical institution. So I bum-rushed Lightcone making demands, and 10 days later found myself running Inkhaven 3 (with Ben now serving as Creative Director).
There's a fair chance that Ben and Lightcone, in trying to create a good writing retreat, have serendipitously discovered a novel form of utopian living. The levels of spontaneous social magic at Inkhaven 1, Inkhaven 2, and plzdontkillus were shockingly high. There's something about writing, publishing daily, and co-living with a bunch of strangers for a month that causes people to really bloom.
You basically get a full year's worth of socializing crammed into a month. It's sort of like living in a dorm in the first year of undergrad, but much more intense, and your peers are more mature and interesting.
Because of this quality of compression, many alums I've talked to have found it intractably difficult to describe their Inkhaven/plzdontkillus experience. I would like more people to get the chance to experience this intense social time dilation.
Is Inkhaven a good experience?
For the residents, strongly yes.
Aggregate data from both cohorts
The principal complaints from cohort #2 were that many residents felt socially isolated, and that they didn't feel like they knew each other well enough by the end. The Inkhaven 3 team is implementing a large number of changes to fix this. Concretely, I'm going to put a large number of social and literary events on the calendar every day, and I'm putting greater emphasis on keeping the residents together on campus.
Ah... The nostalgia...
The events I'll be adding to Inkhaven 3 are broadly of two types:
I'm not ready to announce the specifics of our ideas of the latter type. But in broad strokes: we'll be putting on a large number of workshops designed to help the residents think deeply about the craft of writing.
As for the former type, the team has just announced the "Side Quests" system, which I hope will nudge the residents to try behaviors outside of their default scripts.
However, I do want the overall writing quality and ambitiousness to improve in future cohorts. I am certainly attached to the goal of "producing more Scott Alexanders." I also like the idea of producing a Sam Kriss with good epistemics.
Here are some of my hypotheses about how to bump Inkhaven 3 in this direction:
Selection effects on the cohort: This is not a particularly impressive idea, but it is almost certainly the dominant factor, so it should be discussed explicitly. The cohort for Inkhaven #3 is expected to be 40 people, which is ten fewer than Inkhaven 2. We are also receiving many more applications for this cohort. This allows me to select harder.
More programming: As discussed above, I'll be scheduling frequent writing clinics, talks, group close readings, book clubs, etc.
New influences: I love my rationalist bloggers, but overall they (in my opinion) pay insufficient respect to writing as an aesthetic endeavor. Accordingly, I'm seeking out new advisors from different parts of the logosphere: e.g., the film critic and wit John Powers, who will assist us in cranking out nicer sentences.
Please apply
I love beautiful writing. I love truthful writing. I love useful writing.
I want to see more of all these things before the future washes me away. Come and write with us.
Inkhaven returns, baby! Go to inkhaven.blog to apply.
I'm very excited about our advisors for Inkhaven 3. Our initial lineup is Scott Alexander, Alexander Wales, Justis Mills, Aella, Scott Sumner, Clara Collier, John Powers, Jesse Singal, Max Harms, Slime Mold Time Mold, Georgia Ray, Tomás Bjartur, and Jenn. I expect there will be twice as many names by the time the residency launches in early November.
We'll also be getting more time with Scott Alexander this time around. He'll be hosting frequent office hours throughout the whole program. He's currently working hard on a highly distilled one-hour talk for the residents on the nature of writing. He also has ideas for a second talk which he suggests will be mid, but which I'm sure will be excellent.
Who are you?
I'm Vishal Prasad, a blogger and rationality meetup organizer. I have run Los Angeles Rationality for the last 6 years. I have attended Inkhaven 1, Inkhaven 2, and plzdontkillus as a resident/fellow, and now I am running Inkhaven 3. Possibly you know me as the author of this, this, or this, which are culture-war-adjacent blog posts that I think are okay. More important to me are: my story about a Machiavellian polymath/drunkard from the Islamic Golden Age, my meditation on the nature of ambition, the time I read every blog post from Inkhaven 1 and tried to write a piece in the style of every resident, and my seminal post which has got everyone and their dog dry-scooping their creatine.
Does the world need another Inkhaven?
No, but it's a very good thing.
At the tail end of plzdontkillus, I was told that Ben Pace was leaning against running Inkhaven 3 in order to direct his energies toward new projects. This saddened me, because I believe Inkhaven is a magical institution. So I bum-rushed Lightcone making demands, and 10 days later found myself running Inkhaven 3 (with Ben now serving as Creative Director).
There's a fair chance that Ben and Lightcone, in trying to create a good writing retreat, have serendipitously discovered a novel form of utopian living. The levels of spontaneous social magic at Inkhaven 1, Inkhaven 2, and plzdontkillus were shockingly high. There's something about writing, publishing daily, and co-living with a bunch of strangers for a month that causes people to really bloom.
In my announcement thread on X, I said:
Because of this quality of compression, many alums I've talked to have found it intractably difficult to describe their Inkhaven/plzdontkillus experience. I would like more people to get the chance to experience this intense social time dilation.
Is Inkhaven a good experience?
For the residents, strongly yes.
Aggregate data from both cohorts
The principal complaints from cohort #2 were that many residents felt socially isolated, and that they didn't feel like they knew each other well enough by the end. The Inkhaven 3 team is implementing a large number of changes to fix this. Concretely, I'm going to put a large number of social and literary events on the calendar every day, and I'm putting greater emphasis on keeping the residents together on campus.
Ah... The nostalgia...
The events I'll be adding to Inkhaven 3 are broadly of two types:
I'm not ready to announce the specifics of our ideas of the latter type. But in broad strokes: we'll be putting on a large number of workshops designed to help the residents think deeply about the craft of writing.
As for the former type, the team has just announced the "Side Quests" system, which I hope will nudge the residents to try behaviors outside of their default scripts.
Gotta get me one of those "Goodhart pins"
But wasn't a lot of the writing abject slop?
I don't think so.
On X, I discussed a number of pieces from Inkhaven which I enjoyed considerably, such as those from Jenn [1, 2, 3], Viv [1, 2, 3], Justin Kuiper [1, 2, 3], Aaron Gertler, Alec Thompson, and Jeredino Lavagnino. In addition, Inkhaven has been a good forcing function for some, including Tomás Bjartur, who attributes quite a lot of counterfactual value to having attended Inkhaven.
For those of you here who read LessWrong: so many great LessWrong posts were written as a result of Inkhaven.
Along with many more great posts by TsviBT, Simon Lermen, Shoshannah, Skyler, jenn, Drake Morrison, Adrià Garriga-alonso, John Wentworth, and more. It turns out that many strong thinkers and writers can write valuable things fast. The speed premium does not preclude quality.
However, I do want the overall writing quality and ambitiousness to improve in future cohorts. I am certainly attached to the goal of "producing more Scott Alexanders." I also like the idea of producing a Sam Kriss with good epistemics.
Here are some of my hypotheses about how to bump Inkhaven 3 in this direction:
Please apply
I love beautiful writing. I love truthful writing. I love useful writing.
I want to see more of all these things before the future washes me away. Come and write with us.