Throughout November, I’ve been keeping up with the Inkhaven mandate to write and post a blogpost, of at least 500 words, every day. It’s the last day of November, so how’d that go?
First and foremost: most of my blogposts from this month are pretty mediocre, by my own standards. Not necessarily bad, plausibly worthwhile, but I am not particularly impressed by them.
Largely, that’s because (unlike the Inkhaven program proper) I did not set aside the entire month for post-writing. I worked most of the month, took a vacation in the last week and a half, and none of that time was primarily focused on writing. The large majority of posts were low-effort in one way or another.
About a third were long standing denizens of my drafts area. For those, I mostly got them done by abandoning whatever vision I originally had for the post, instead filling in only what was already in my head, just enough to make the post shippable at all. Thus posts like e.g.:
Moonrise, which is one half of a really good post on AI alignment
Where’s The Capital, which is a minimal viable writeup of a project from years ago
On the bright side, the drafts section of my tabs bar has shrunk considerably.
Several more posts were quick writeups of small research ideas or whatever else I was thinking about. There’s value in that sort of thing, and I do endorse writing those, but they’re not the sort of thing which most people (even on LessWrong) should read. Stat Mech of Interfaces Under Selection Pressure and Zen of Maxent are good examples.
In hindsight, I don’t think it was worthwhile for me to try to publish a post every day of November. Maybe it would have been as a full time project, but definitely not on the side. The stress cost more than the value produced. I definitely don’t think I will do this again, at least not without a very different approach (like e.g. taking the whole month off from all other work).
Should I have just stopped earlier in the month? Ten days in, I already pretty strongly expected that it wouldn’t be worthwhile in hindsight. But there’s an awful lot of value in seeing through precommitments—both for oneself, and for reputational purposes. I very tentatively endorse having stuck it out, even though the costs exceeded the benefits in this particular case. But I do still feel like I want to give a tiny little fuck you to the precommitment, which is why this post is exactly 499 words.
November Retrospective
Throughout November, I’ve been keeping up with the Inkhaven mandate to write and post a blogpost, of at least 500 words, every day. It’s the last day of November, so how’d that go?
First and foremost: most of my blogposts from this month are pretty mediocre, by my own standards. Not necessarily bad, plausibly worthwhile, but I am not particularly impressed by them.
Largely, that’s because (unlike the Inkhaven program proper) I did not set aside the entire month for post-writing. I worked most of the month, took a vacation in the last week and a half, and none of that time was primarily focused on writing. The large majority of posts were low-effort in one way or another.
About a third were long standing denizens of my drafts area. For those, I mostly got them done by abandoning whatever vision I originally had for the post, instead filling in only what was already in my head, just enough to make the post shippable at all. Thus posts like e.g.:
Moonrise, which is one half of a really good post on AI alignment
Where’s The Capital, which is a minimal viable writeup of a project from years ago
How I Learned That I Don’t Feel Companionate Love, which is a pretty cool post but also most of it was posted earlier as a shortform
Status Is The Game Of The Loser’s Bracket or Snippets on Living In Reality, in which I took a bunch of thoughts on a common theme and just… skipped the step where I weave those together into a single narrative
On the bright side, the drafts section of my tabs bar has shrunk considerably.
Several more posts were quick writeups of small research ideas or whatever else I was thinking about. There’s value in that sort of thing, and I do endorse writing those, but they’re not the sort of thing which most people (even on LessWrong) should read. Stat Mech of Interfaces Under Selection Pressure and Zen of Maxent are good examples.
In hindsight, I don’t think it was worthwhile for me to try to publish a post every day of November. Maybe it would have been as a full time project, but definitely not on the side. The stress cost more than the value produced. I definitely don’t think I will do this again, at least not without a very different approach (like e.g. taking the whole month off from all other work).
Should I have just stopped earlier in the month? Ten days in, I already pretty strongly expected that it wouldn’t be worthwhile in hindsight. But there’s an awful lot of value in seeing through precommitments—both for oneself, and for reputational purposes. I very tentatively endorse having stuck it out, even though the costs exceeded the benefits in this particular case. But I do still feel like I want to give a tiny little fuck you to the precommitment, which is why this post is exactly 499 words.