Halfhaven Forever
Scott Alexander, a famous blogger with about 100 000 subscribers, once said:
“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.”
We know that “correlation is not causation” and that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. But we also know that “practice makes perfect”, so...
In November 2025, Lightcone Infrastructure organized The Inkhaven Residency, where 30 people posted 1 blog per day during 30 days, with feedback and mentorship from other successful writers.
For people who couldn’t take a month off to participate in the event, a less intense online alternative Halfhaven was provided in October and November 2025, as a Discord group to post links to your blogposts, with a soft target of 1 blog each 2 days.
After the holidays, I think it is time to try again. If you haven’t joined Halfhaven before, but you thought about it, this may be the right moment to join. If you were at Inkhaven, and you need an extra nudge to keep writing now that it is over, you are also welcome.
Click here to join: https://discord.gg/FqPppfdHQE
What’s different this time
Three months
The writing tempo is reduced—now you have three months to collect your 30 points. That means: January, February, and March 2026.
The idea is to keep doing this forever; that is, as long as people are interested in doing it. Because, becoming a successful blogger is an ongoing project, not something you just do once and then you stop. But people seem to benefit from having artificial deadlines. So the deadline is every three months. You try to achieve 30 points until the deadline. Then your score resets and you try again. (You are encouraged to collect your points a few weeks before the deadline, and then take a break. Then return in April.)
Points
Previous Inkhaven/Halfhaven rules created a pressure to write short articles, or to split potentially longer articles into multiple parts, because only the number of articles counted, not how long they were (as long as they were at least 500 words long).
To reduce this pressure, so that people can choose more freely between writing short or long articles, as they wish, or as appropriate for the topic, now the articles get a certain number of points—more for the longer ones, but less than linearly. Specifically:
1 point 🪙 = 500 words or more
2 points 🪙🪙 = 1500 words or more
3 points 🪙🪙🪙 = 3000 words or more
4 points 🪙🪙🪙🪙 = 5000 words or more
Some people wanted to make video posts instead; the scoring for videos is:
1 point 🪙 = 10 minutes or more
2 points 🪙🪙 = 30 minutes or more
3 points 🪙🪙🪙 = 60 minutes or more
So at the end of the third month, you are supposed to have collected 30 points; not necessarily written 30 articles or recorded 30 videos.
I hope these two changes will make the project more sustainable.
Don’t worry about the exact date
Previous Inkhaven/Halfhaven rules required users to post exactly/at most one blogpost per day. I think that it is good to avoid self-deception like “I don’t feel like writing today, but that’s okay, because I can still make multiple posts on the last day”, because realistically, that is either not going to happen, or you will feel deeply ashamed for the quality of those last-minute posts. But I am not going to micromanage you.
The only time limit is to post articles between January 1st and March 31st. (Your local time, if that makes a difference. It shouldn’t.)
What remains the same
You participate by joining the discord channel, and posting links to your blogposts in the appropriate forum (currently “blogposts-2026-q1”). The recommended format is:
how many points for this posts (by default, one point)
how many total points you have now (to see your progress easily)
a hyperlink to the post
the title of the post (optional if it is obvious from the link)
For example:
2 points (total 7) http://example.com/on-blogging.html—On blogging
Please only post links in the “blogposts-2026-q1”. There is another channel, “general-discussion”, for the general discussion and feedback to other participants’ blogposts.
It is acceptable to award yourself more points for a shorter article or a video, if the extra effort justifies it. The 500 words / 10 minutes standard is meant for a typical essay or recording; if you e.g. composed a poem, or drew a complicated diagram, or created an animation, feel free to assign yourself the points regardless of the words / minutes.
Languages other than English are also accepted, but you only get points for the original content, not for translations, not even translations of your own work. (So if you post a short article in five different languages, you only get one point, for the first version.)
Do not use AI to generate the main content. You can use AI to e.g. generate the images to accompany your text.
Do not post pornography or hate speech or… other problematic content. There is no exact definition, please use your judgment. (This is not a ban on political content in general; just, uhm, please don’t be stupid or hateful, m’kay?)
The content has to be publicly available, i.e. not behind a paywall. (It is okay to put it behind a paywall let’s say one month after the deadline.)
It is okay if you publish on different places, for example some posts on your private blog, some posts on Less Wrong, and some videos on YouTube. (Actually, please do not post everything indiscriminately on Less Wrong, unless it is the kind of content that you would have posted on Less Wrong anyway.)
Ultimately, this entire project is honor-based. I will not try to detect AI usage, or copyright violation, or whether you counted the words correctly. It’s all up to you. (Blatant violations may be addressed by social pressure and/or a ban.)
Importantly, this is not a competition; it does not matter who achieves the 30 points first. Also, after achieving the 30 points, you are supposed to take a break and celebrate, not try to maximize the number of points. In this sense, it is possible for everyone to “win”.
References
Halfhaven discord group (invite link, never expires)
Related Less Wrong posts:
Out of curiosity, let’s see many points Scott Alexander would get for the last three months of 2025. Skipping the open threads and links and guest posts and highlights from comments and meetup announcements and contests and grant results...
What Is Man, That Thou Art Mindful Of Him? (10k) 🪙🪙🪙🪙
Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (6k) 🪙🪙🪙🪙
Defining Defending Democracy: Contra The Election Winner Argument (1.3k) 🪙
Sources Say Bay Area House Party (3.3k) 🪙🪙🪙
The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know (28k) 🪙🪙🪙🪙
Fascism Can’t Mean Both A Specific Ideology And A Legitimate Target (1.7k) 🪙🪙
Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds (2.5k) 🪙🪙
Model City Monday 10/27/25 (3.1k) 🪙🪙🪙
Writing For The AIs (1.2k) 🪙
The Bloomer’s Paradox (2.7k) 🪙🪙
In What Sense Is Life Suffering? (800) 🪙
What Happened To SF Homelessness? (2.3k) 🪙🪙
The New AI Consciousness Paper (3.8k) 🪙🪙🪙
Why AI Safety Won’t Make America Lose The Race With China (4.4k) 🪙🪙🪙
The Good News Is That One Side Has Definitively Won The Missing Heritability Debate (1.7k) 🪙🪙
Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know (4.2k) 🪙🪙🪙
The Pledge (1.1k) 🪙
Against Against Boomers (2.1k) 🪙🪙
Total: 43 points.
Surely 28K should be at least 5 points!
Well, yes. The question is, how much exactly. I mean, what are the points even supposed to reflect?
The thing I am trying to capture is “value for the reader”. As a reader of ACX, I prefer longer articles to shorter articles, assuming constant frequency. But I prefer two articles a week to one twice-as-long article.
Mathematically speaking, this means that the function “how many words for N points” should be growing, faster than linearly. But that still leaves many options. Intuitively, I chose 250n²+250n, as a quadratic (faster than linear) expression with backwards compatibility (results in 500 for n=1). If we extrapolate that further, it would be 5 points for 7.5k words, 6 points for 10.5k words, 7 points for 14k words, 8 points for 18k words, 9 points for 22.5k words, and 10 points for 27.5k words.
According to this extended scale, Scott would get 6+4+1+3+10+2+2+3+1+2+1+2+3+3+2+3+1+2= 51 points.
But that assumes that the particular quadratic function is the right one. If we chose an exponential function instead: 1 point for 500 words, 2 points for 1k words, 3 points for 2k words, 4 points for 4k words, 5 points for 8k words, and 6 points for 16k words, that would give slightly more points to articles below 4k, but fewer points above 10k, together 5+4+2+3+6+2+3+3+2+3+1+3+3+4+2+4+2+3= 55 points.
Both functions seem to pass the smell test—Scott should get more than 30 points, but not like an order of magnitude more (especially not after I have filtered out the links and contests and highlights). Getting about twice as much sounds about right. Still doesn’t answer which function to choose; both seem okay precisely because they give similar results.
Another question is, how often will Halfhaven participants produce articles longer than 5k words. I know I probably won’t, which makes the scoring of articles over 5k words seem irrelevant. I am open to changing my mind if someone actually starts writing the articles of such length, but at this moment it feels like if someone can write that kind of article repeatedly, they no longer need this project.
tl;dr—the choice is arbitrary, and probably irrelevant for Halfhaven participants, so although I kinda agree with you, I am not going to change it now (but might change it in April, dunno)
I didn’t make a postmortem of the original Halfhaven, so maybe let’s use this comment for a quick survey?
Please add a react (not vote) to this comment (by clicking the light-gray emoji in the bottom-right corner),
✔ - if you participated in the original Halfhaven and produced 30 posts during October and November 2025
✘ - if you participated in the original Halfhaven but failed to produce 30 posts