If you don’t know, Inkhaven is a residency where you come and publish a blogpost every day. No “Oh it would be nice to blog some day” or “Oh I’m working on something, I’m sure I’ll publish it some day”. No, you have to publish today, otherwise you are asked to leave.

After 10 days into the first ever Inkhaven cohort, here are some things I’ve learned.

1. Everyone publishes.

I have 41 people here writing, most of them living at Lighthaven, all of them visiting at least a few days per week. In recent weeks, I knew I was hurtling toward their arrival and I’d be in the thick of it; while I believed this abstractly, I didn’t know what to concretely visualize.

Any time that anyone has said to me that they want to push down the publishing requirement, maybe to every 2 or 3 days, I have said “No. The typical human adult types at 40 words per minute. Writing 500 words should take only 12.5 minutes. I can get a reasonably long LessWrong comment written in under 30 minutes. This isn’t that hard.”

Yet this has not always been satisfying to these people. One of them decided not to come. Another one did and has had some dissatisfaction with the quality of their writing.

But overall, it’s borne out. Not one person has dropped out so far.^[1]

We’ve published over 400 blogposts.

2. Essentially everyone is yoloing it every single day

Here is the data about how many blogposts residents have written right now that they can hit publish on.

That’s 24 ppl with 0, and 11 ppl with more. (A few residents haven’t filled out this form.)

To explain further, see this graph of what hour people publish their post each day.

Note that a few show-offs are staying up just past midnight to publish their post for the *next* day *cough* Tsvi BT *cough.*

People are finishing their posts increasingly close to the deadline—about 20% of posts so far have been published after 11pm!

3. People do not use physical spaces the way you planned.

I made beautiful coworking space for people! With height-adjustable desks and external monitors! But they mostly write in the living room, or at the lunch tables. Bah.

My own team meeting happening randomly outside!

Some of our residents are still learning how to use benches.

4. It’s not too stressful, and is kind of energizing.

In the feedback form yesterday, I asked how stressful Inkhaven has been (from “1= Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezey” to “10 = Close to having a panic attack”).

Only two people gave an 8, and one of them was a mentor who is also doing a lot of writing while here.

I also asked “How emotionally energized vs. drained have you felt this week?” from “1 = Totally drained / spent” to “10 = Incredibly energized / inspired”.

This leans toward the energizing side.

5. Residents suck at proactively getting help from other people

I brought them so many people to give them advice.

I brought Gwern, Scott Alexander, Aella, Alexander Wales, Clara Collier, Adam Mastroianni, Sasha Chapin, Andy Matuschak, Slime Mold Time Mold, and many more.

And man, people are mostly just sitting on their own.

We tried to incentivize getting help.

As background, to incentivize publishing, we made a winners’ lounge. It’s a cool room with ice cream, alcohol, and super smash bros; but you can only go there once you’ve published today. It’s pretty fun.

Then, to get people to utilize the contributing writers, we said that if you just have one such person read a draft of yours this week, you get access to the Diamond Platinum Elite Double Secret Winner’s Lounge.

Now we’re edging toward sensible things happening.

Like, Gwern has done over 10 cumulative hours of office hours, where you can just show up with a draft, he’ll read it and discuss it with you for up to 60 mins, with others listening, then move on. He gives great feedback. The first person in the first office hours brought him a list of 30 blogpost ideas, and he spent 40 mins going through them, talking about what would be the interesting parts in each one, giving more ideas, etc.

And yet, I think ~most of the Residents haven’t shown up to one of these yet? Even though we’re a third of the way in?

Or consider: I’ve made a form where you can submit essays to these established writers for feedback. Only 27 of the Residents have used it. The most popular person to submit to is Scott Alexander, and if you do he is known to write a whole goddam essay back to you about the structure and argument of your piece. Yet this has happened only 13 times.

These writers are around and want to help. I will keep working on fixing this market failure.

Bonus thing: We’ve had a bunch of essays spend time on the frontpage of Hacker News.

Trying two dozen different psychedelics (60 points)
Robert Hooke’s “Cyberpunk” Letter to Gottfried Leibniz (96 points)
Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work (139 points)
Unexpected things that are people (638 points)

I’m interested in hearing questions that people have about Inkhaven! I may address them in the comments or in future posts.

^
I will acknowledge there have been two close calls. One person cut over 1,000 words of drafts down to ~460 words, not noticing it was under the minimum of 500. We have since implemented a mandatory word-count check. And another person only submitted the form to our system at exactly midnight, which is technically the next day. I trust them that they published the post more than one minute before then, but we told them not to do it again.

5 Things I Learned After 10 Days of Inkhaven

1. Everyone publishes.

2. Essentially everyone is yoloing it every single day

3. People do not use physical spaces the way you planned.

4. It’s not too stressful, and is kind of energizing.

5. Residents suck at proactively getting help from other people