One Week in the Rat Farm

Hello, LessWrong. This is a personal introduction diary-ish post and it does not have a thesis. I apologise if this isn’t a good fit for the website; I just needed to unload my brain somewhere and this seemed like the spiritually correct place.

I write to you from the Lighthaven campus in fabulous Berkeley, CA. It’s my first time here and I am enchanted.

After one week of full-body immersion, I am completely fascinated with the Rationalist philosophy, culture, community. I do not know whether I ‘belong’ here, as such, and I am writing this post in the hopes of interrogating the feelings I’m experiencing.

After all, why do I feel so positively about the above when I’ve barely scratched the surface and know almost nothing of what it is I’m looking at? Do I just feel warm because of positive vibes and an ornately-decorated campus? Do I just feel alive because coming to Berkeley feels like an adventure compared to the monotonous university-working life that I’ve come from?

In other words: do I like the ideas, or do I just like the vibes?

Maybe. I think that’s a bias worth challenging.

I do not know if this type of post is appropriate for LessWrong. I only created my account this morning (though I’ve lurked LW on and off for the last few weeks).

I hope this post is at least a little interesting for some of you. Think of me as an outsider looking in.

Who am I?

My name is Philip Harker. I am a 23 year old human male; born, raised, and educated in Toronto, ON. I market/PR video games for a living. I have many interests but lately I’m allocating a lot of time and energy to reading and writing science fiction and fantasy.

Why am I at Lighthaven?

I am a Resident at the Inkhaven Writer’s Residency this April. You may have seen some of us floating around on LessWrong and elsewhere in the last week. From 1-30 April we are required to write and publish one 500+ word post per day or get kicked out.

So what am I doing here?

I am an enormous fan of Nicholas Decker’s Homo Economicus and Aella’s Knowingless. I first found out about those people via their excellent and spicy tweets, and I followed their blogs shortly afterwards. I didn’t really know anything about rationalism/postrationalism/LessWrong/Bayesian ethics/AI safety at the time. I just found their ideas interesting. I’ll come back to that.

When I tell people here that my initial point of contact to this world was not Scott Alexander or Gwern, but rather “Aella’s gangbang flowchart” or “Decker’s encounter with the US Secret Service”, it raises eyebrows. I think someone referred to that as “third generation rationalism” or something along those lines, but that may have been derisive.

My good friend and mentor Jonathan Chiang has been to Manifest at Lighthaven once or twice, so he’s presumably on some kind of newsletter. He heard about Inkhaven, he knows I am a writer and I love Decker and Aella, so in January he suggested that I apply. This was the first time I learned about Lighthaven or LessWrong or any of this stuff, really.

I was a bit nervous because my fascination with spaceships and siegecraft and forced human breeding institutions is very personal; not only would I be forced to publish my stuff, but I might also be a lone amateur fictionist among tech bros and AI policy thinkers.

I was wrong on that last concern, but regardless I feel like a fish out of water here at Lighthaven. I suspect my IQ is in the bottom quartile, and I also suspect I’m the most neurotypical, least Rationalist, and most theist of the 55 Residents present.

That said, I am really enjoying my time here. I’m learning some things.

What have I seen?

I think it’s a little bit cringe for me to immediately start gawking at Lighthaven being this sort of utopian garden of reason and intellectualism, walled off from Berkeley, where every nook and corner is home to a fascinating conversation about David Hume or Claude Code.

People have already talked about that.

I am going to instead list some observations that I have made in one week of living and working at Lighthaven. This is not raw data; think of it as a set of working observations that I could maybe form into more substantial theses if I sat and thought about it.

Ratspeak

I don’t know whether this is a rationalist thing in specific or a NorCal/Bay Area/tech bro thing generally, but I have observed a lot of what I am currently calling “Ratspeak”. Fun examples include:

One’s model as shorthand for their understanding/worldview on things (e.g. “interesting, that doesn’t fit my model of how dating works”)
Updating one’s priors as shorthand for potentially changing their worldview on things; particularly updating the first principles on which they reason and make specific conclusions within the domain of a model.
Agency as a personality trait. I read Sammy Cottrell’s excellent post on agency a few weeks ago and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
“-adjacent” as a hyphenated compound^[1] appended to things (e.g. “Rationalist-adjacent, tech-adjacent, healthcare-adjacent).
Salient as “important and engaging idea, usually in the context of writing.”

It’s possible that I understand some or all of these terms incorrectly. But these ideas are so ingrained in the vernacular here that it’s impossible for me not to feel culture shock.

No Punishment for Bad Takes

I come from a fairly left-wing progressive “woke” political background. I’ve grown a little disenchanted with the political left in the last couple of years or so, but for the most part that’s how I politically identify when asked.

In these circles (particularly on Twitter, but also IRL) bad takes are punished. If you broadcast an opinion that is incorrect or harmful or disliked, people are very quick to rush to the conclusion that you are a bad person. I’m sympathetic to people in this sphere for their allergic reactions to people like me; trolls love to frame themselves as “just asking questions”, but it’s so frustrating to have to walk on eggshells whenever I want to get involved in the discourse.

I read the LessWrong new user’s guide this morning and there’s an anecdote about a new user being surprised that a LessWrong comments argument ended with someone changing their mind. I’ve had a few moments like that on Twitter, but Twitter arguments are always cloaked in emotion (usually rage). No one really seems particularly interested in truth-seeking, so arguments there are pointless. They serve only my own masochistic mental masturbation.

I won’t get into details here, but in short, I do not have the same complaints about the arguments I’ve observed at Lighthaven so far. By and large, if you have a bad opinion here you will not be scolded. You will just be told why you are wrong.

Eugenics

“Eugenics” is not a bad word here. I’ve heard at least one person here confirm in so many words that they identify as a eugenicist and are into eugenics ideas.

I could do a whole separate post about “eugenics” as an idea and as a dirty word. I find it interesting. I should make it clear that I do not identify as a eugenicist at all, and I think that self-identification is tolerated here. But this is the first place I’ve been where “I am a eugenicist” is not treated 1:1 as “I am a Nazi”.

I don’t want to give the impression here that I’m shocked. I’m not. I read Decker, as I mentioned. But I am a little surprised by it.

Autism

One of my first texts back home to friends from Inkhaven was “everyone here is so fucking autistic”. That was just my observation, and it was later confirmed to me as more and more people started self-identifying as such.

I’m quite neurotypical. People have joked about me being autistic but I think that’s based on a shallower definition of autism as “person with hobbies and weak social skills”. So as an outsider it’s weird to see such a concentration of autistic people and just how diverse they are. Some are very loud, some are very quiet. Some have deep inner technical brains and often seem lost in thought, while others are very externally excited to talk to you about Costco.

When I brought this up with Advisor Professor Steven Hsu, he agreed. He thinks there’s probably some amount of selection in favour of autistic people for Rationalism generally and the Inkhaven Residency specifically. Useful information, I guess. I only note the autism thing here because I’ve just never seen anything like it.

People Just Say and Do Shit

At the core of what I admire about Nicholas Decker and Aella is that they do not give a single fuck. They say what they think and they don’t soften their language for fear of negative feedback. That conviction takes courage. I would like to embody those traits one day, both creatively and in my day-to-day life.

That philosophy does not seem unique to Decker or Aella. Lots of people here do it. The other night I witnessed an Inkhaven Alumna point-blank tell a Resident “It’s sexually unattractive when you behave like that, you’re acting like a clown.^[2]”

People here operate with a sort of baseline fearlessness. People just randomly publicly cuddle with each other (with a baseline of consent and trust, one would assume, but it’s still jarring.) People perform 10 minute plays they wrote 20 minutes ago. People casually drop “yeah I’d like to have 10-20 children ideally”. People are happy to verbally tell you about their experiences with heroin or their careers as an “MMA Dominatrix”.

Granted, part of this may tie into other observations (see Autism). But it’s so refreshing. No one at Lighthaven bullshits.

AI-generated Images

Ubiquitous. The clear majority of people here seem to use and embrace them. AI-generated images and videos mostly leave a bad taste in my mouth, and I’m hardly alone in that. My desired audience in particular— SFF nerds back home— have pretty strong anti-AI sentiment, and for many reasons rational and irrational I share that sentiment.

Don’t get me wrong, I use Claude. I think it’s incredible, but I still think that I’m a better writer than Claude is on the whole. But I do not use AI-generated images, I think they look cheap and I think that your typical sci-fi reader is going to see an AI-generated thumbnail on a post and assume the entire post was written by ChatGPT. I can’t really blame them for thinking that.

But yes, the presence of AI-generated images on the majority of posts at Inkhaven so far is very interesting to me. For my stories about hackers and dragons, it really would be useful to have quickly-iterated free images to use as thumbnails, but I resist, through some combination of personal bias and mindfulness of the SFF community. Others here don’t seem to care about that.

Children and Families

When I think of a “writer’s residency” ala Past Lives (2023), I have this bias that people who call themselves “writers” and do hardcore writer-ish things like attend a month-long residency are childless and often single people. The types who do child-free weddings.

There’s a bit of romance in the idea of writers as tortured lonely souls who cut themselves off from society. But on the contrary, many of the Team, Advisors, and Residents have brought their spouses and small to medium-sized children.

I’m not really a “pro-natalist” in the philosophical sense^[3]. But I am extremely skeptical of anti-children, anti-natalist vibes in the public discourse.

It’s a weird and tiny thing, but the presence of families here makes Lighthaven feel so much more alive.

Really Excellent Vibes

This final observation is the crux of my post. After one week here, I think the vibes at Lighthaven are exceptional. People are highly intelligent but not assholes about it.

Last night I attended an open mic night. I did not perform, I didn’t engage much with the other spectators, I was mostly just sitting and absorbing. And it was wonderful. Euphoric. I lack the words to describe it exactly, and I definitely lack the insight to understand why it felt so awesome. But it did.

But given everything that I have observed at Lighthaven— the good, the neutral, and the bad— does it make sense that I feel so positively about it? Do I feel at home because the vibes are good, or are the vibes good because I feel at home?

What is the point of this post?

I’m not entirely sure.^[4]

I understand that my brain is currently being flooded with reward chemicals due to the sheer novelty of the situation. For years I was a depressed, anxious, broke, lonely student in Toronto. All of a sudden I have been whisked away to paradise, permitted to write about and talk about whatever I want, and there’s cheap wine and warm weather and Rob Miles hanging around (!!!) and a catgirl (???) and free Oreos in the kitchen.

So when I think to myself “yes, this is awesome, I want to be a Rationalist, I want to get on LessWrong, I want to move to a Berkeley flop house”, I need to interrogate that. I need to figure out whether what I enjoy are the tenets of the philosophy, culture, and community or the vibes of the Inkhaven Writer’s Residency.

This post is my attempt to do so.

^
IDK what you would call “-adjacent” grammatically, in the way you might say “looks-maxxed” or “California-pilled”. Claude says it’s a hyphenated compound, whatever that means.
^
In the Alumna’s defence, the Resident had already been asking for advice with women and dating. But man, that was harsh.
^
I am a Catholic, though, so all my friends assume that I’m a pro-natalist. The jokes are funny. But it’s worth considering that pro-natalists do not themselves need to aspire to have children, and vice versa.
Personally I might not even get married.
^
The cynic may argue that I’m only writing this post because I need to make a post daily for Inkhaven; I’ll accept that argument but for the record I may not even submit this post for my Inkhaven requirement. I have a book review to write today. Maybe this can be a bonus post?
A fellow Resident and I came to the conclusion the other day that if we’re going to write about writing/Inkhaven/Lighthaven it’s probably best kept to bonus “wasted” posts. I’d feel dissatisfied if I leave the Residency and realise that I was basically just diary blogging about the Residency for ⁸⁄₃₀ days of the Residency.