tl;dr: Lightcone Infrastructure is running The Inkhaven Residency. For the 30 days of November, ~30 people will posts 30 blogposts – 1 per day. There will also be feedback and mentorship from other great writers, including Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, Gwern, and more TBA. In this post I talk a little about why I am running this and think the structure is a good one.

"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."
—Scott Alexander, Dwarkesh Patel Podcast

Essays like Paul Graham's, Scott Alexander's, and Eliezer Yudkowsky's have influenced a generation of people in how they think about startups, ethics, science, and the world as a whole. Creating essays that good takes a lot of skill, practice, and talent, but it looks to me that a lot of people with talent aren't putting in the work and developing the skill, except in ways that are optimized to also be social media strategies.

To fix this problem, I am running the Inkhaven Residency. The idea is to gather a bunch of promising writers to invest in the art and craft of blogging, through a shared commitment to each publish a blogpost every day for the month of November.

Why a daily writing structure? Well, it's partly a reaction to other fellowships I've seen. I've seen month-long or years-long events with exceedingly little public output, where the people would've contributed far more to humanity's understanding if they simply blogged regularly about their ideas. I also believe regularly shipping is healthy: it gets you in touch with all parts of the process, and avoids you self-deceiving about how good your output would be if you were to ship.

The idea came to us partly by comparison to NaNoWriMo, and a draft name for this residency was NaBloWriMo. 30 blogposts in 30 days is very schelling, and the success/fail criteria are clear.

To be clear, I don't expect that every day every writer will write a great post. Slate Star Codex had over 1,500 posts, and not all of them were Meditations on Moloch. I think the daily commitment is partly a way to ensure writing is a focus of your life, and some people should often write a fast blogpost and then spend more of their time redrafting more ambitious essays for other days. Other people have built up a lot of ideas over time, or...

Sonia Albrecht

Sonia Albrecht

Sonia Albrecht

Sonia Albrecht