The Inkhaven Residency
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The Inkhaven Spotlight
Daily newsletter, compiled by Vaniver
Residents
Today, 4 out of 41 residents have published
The Inkhaven Spotlight
Daily newsletter, compiled by Vaniver
Vishal Prasad writes a piece in the style of all of the residents:
mingyuan reflects on raising children:
Ben Steinhorn describes tall people in groups:
Hauke Hillebrant analyzes Eurocope.
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the power of perception.
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper. -- W.B. Yeats
William analyzes the motives of the Great Powers leading up to World War One:
Every Great Power Fought World War One For A Different Reason
Amanda writes about moves, renovations, and the elusive Before Times:
Croissanthrology contemplates the future:
I'm unsure what's going to happen
Logisticks writes about advertising for fantasy authors.
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the virtue of originality.
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all. -- Abraham Lincoln
Alex Altair writes about not becoming an old man (when it comes to tech).
Jenn writes about Montaigne's Epistemology.
Lucent considers Wikipedia, from the perspective before its creation:
Aelerinya describes how to develop the perceptual acuity involved in cooking:
To cook well, train your Inner Flavor Simulator
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the virtue of doing it today.
Whatever can be done another day can be done today. -- Michel de Montaigne
The end of Inkhaven approaches; only 10% of the program is left, and many of the residents have already left due to Thanksgiving. But people are still publishing, and here are some of my favorite posts from Wednesday.
Lucent talks about strategies, perceptions, and phases:
Sasha Putilin describes meditation's interaction with smooth muscle:
Meditation as Wakeful Relaxation: Unclenching Smooth Muscle (26/30)
Jenn considers Brown Fields, Mausoleums. Ben Pace remarks on Despair, Serenity, Song, and Nobility in"Hollow Knight: Silksong".
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and expressing gratitude.
Great things happen to those who don't stop believing, trying, learning, and being grateful. -- Roy T. Bennett
Signore Galilei explains how we know what happens in the center of the earth , anyway.
Alex Altair on having really, really strong convictions.
Adria Garriga-Alonso on why we might want to settle an old philosophy debate quick:
Spatially distributed consciousness is not an abstract thought experiment if AI is conscious
Linch Zhang on how people have been getting smarter throughout history:
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the virtue of self-awareness.
I bet the sparrow looks at the parrot and thinks, yes, you can talk, but LISTEN TO YOURSELF! -- Jack Handey
Margarita Lovelace coming in with a new hobby and possibly the best title out of all of Inkhaven:
Why You, the Sex God, Should Get a Scuba Diving License
Guy Nosilverv explains how to get out of the car already what jhanas are, for the benefit of killjoy skeptics like myself:
I asked what Jhanas questions you had. I wish I hadn't.
William Friedman explains how Medieval Venice accomplished the improbable: building a massive preindustrial empire by being good at trading:
A Brief History of Venice, Part One
Nikola Jurkovic on keeping promises between childhood and adulthood, and between humans as we are now and humans in the future that might be:
mingyuan on the underrated art of maintaining a functional space:
Housework is important, highly skilled work
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the dream of brevity.
Soon I'll find the right words, they'll be very simple. -- Jack Kerouac
Alex Altair investigates the relative ages of oracle bone script and bronze script.
Sasha Putilin describes a simple screening methodology for ADHD:
A One-Minute ADHD Test (23/30)
Guy attempts to understand Eliezer's stance on consciousness:
Eliezer Yudkowsky Thinks Chickens (and Babies) Aren't Conscious and I Know Why
Kuiper investigates analogies between creatives in Reiner Knizia is to board games what ____ is to film.
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the power of understanding.
Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. -- Francis Bacon
Lydia Nottingham investigates models of how human wages will change if AGI takes off:
Endogenous Automation Will Hit You
Nomads Vagabonds considers tradeoffs in messaging about timelines:
mingyuan leaves a trap:
Over-updating on unusually bad situations
Daniel Paleka considers the apocalyptic residual.
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the power of freedom.
A work of art is a declaration of freedom. -- Oskar Schlemmer
Memory made material:
Finding feeling falsehoods:
A Thousand Falsehoods (Part 1)
Carefully curating curiosity:
Five family forms:
5 cohesive strategies for parenting I've seen
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the habit of including artistry in your work and life.
When the objects we use every day and the surroundings we live in have become in themselves a work of art, then we shall be able to say that we gave achieved a balanced life. -- Bruno Munari
20 days in, and astonishingly, all the residents are still writing! Some highlights from the 20th:
Rob Miles recounts The Shibari Game. TsviBT imagines the Forum poweruser forum.
Nomads Vagabonds talks about unbelievable imagery and video:
Pics and It Still Probably Didn't Happen
Joanna Bregan asks about children in group houses:
Why does everyone want to raise kids with their friends in a group house but no one does it?
Lucent proposes the One Map Hypothesis:
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the practice of maintaining forward momentum.
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Adria describes research taste:
Two rules for good research taste
Lucent describes how scams work:
Ben Pace describes a fictional scammer , and Rob Miles describes finding the work of a new person who's the real deal.
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the virtue of authenticity.
That inner voice has both gentleness and clarity. So to get to authenticity, you really keep going down to the bone, to the honesty, and the inevitability of something. -- Meredith Monk
Rob Miles suggests Unbundling Ideologies into Problems and Solutions.
Nomads Vagabonds covers the first election where AI might be a major issue, and how industry spending might impact it:
You Come at the King, You Best Not Miss
Guy describes his process for crafting a viral tweet:
Human Invariant describes Prediction Markets as a Libertarian Black Box.
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the power of editing.
You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page. -- Jodi Picoult
Tomas Bjartur writes a story about a grandson's studies.
Lucent writes about desires connected to reality.
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the virtue of brevity.
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
Joanna discusses delegation and authority:
Delegating while sitting in my seat of authority as the matriarch
Raye investigates wanting:
Nikola Jurkovic considers AI persuasion:
Michael Dickens argues that Knowing Whether AI Alignment Is a One-Shot Problem Is a One-Shot Problem.
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and thinking by communicating.
We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought. -- Oliver Sacks
Halfway thru, and heroically, none of the residents have failed to publish. Here are my favorite three from the 15th:
Vishal Prasad writes about preferences and puzzles; about fighting and finding success.
William Friedman writes about Byzantine history, and using barbarians to fight barbarians:
BYZ 103: Use Barbarians To Control The Barbarians
Mikhail Samin writes about access, whistleblowing, and democracy in Russia:
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the Latin alphabet.
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Nomads Vagabonds covers the Claude-enabled cyberattack discovered by Anthropic:
Claude Was Just Following Orders
Rob Miles recounts Hypa-Q: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. TsviBT considers Tools for deferring gracefully. Human Invariant asks Why did it take so long for prediction markets to find product-market fit?
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the power of endurance.
Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second. -- William James
Magician Warrior King Lover Training Games - Margarita Lovelace
A mysterious piece. Four aspects you can embody, and how to train them. The author does not tell me why I would want those, but my curiosity is spiked. I find myself playing along, imagining when next I could practice.
Just Another Five Minutes - Screwtape
This piece transported me right by Skyler's side. I saw what a day as Scott Alexander's Fanboy in Chief looked like, and it was the epitome of the manager's schedule. A work made of 5 minute increments. An incessant stream of interruptions. Insights gleaned and recorded in the gaps between two notifications. I especially appreciated how the piece itself feels like it was written in 5 minute increments, stolen from the stream of interruptions.
Rational Teletubbies - Tomas Bjartur
If an ASI could learn physics from watching a video of a falling apple, what might a Teletubbies learn by watching its stomach-television? Tinky-Winky is a fetal prodigy, and he's not satisfied with the state of Teletubbyland.
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the power of collaboration.
Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much. -- Helen Keller
Hauke Hillebrandt gives Technical writing tips.
Margarita Lovelace encourages you to treat your husband like a cat:
Treat Your Husband Like a Cat: The One Simple Change to Enchant Your Home
William Friedman writes about equilibria in fiction:
and Vishal describes Daniel Dennett's "Real Patterns".
Daniel Dennett's "Real Patterns"
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the power of deadlines.
Without a deadline, your work is never over. The power of deadlines leads your work to completion. -- Thomas Vato
Nomads Vagabonds investigates the study that claims 95% of generative AI pilots fail, and finds their data supports a rather different claim.
Ben Steinhorn visits the symphony with his grandfather; a study of perception.
Vishal Prasad examines Thomas Cromwell, seen thru the lens of two different pieces of historical fiction (one much more flattering than the other).
Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall: Women, Domesticity, Craft
Lucent talks about cravings, set points, and the variety of experience.
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the power of persistence.
Energy and persistence conquer all things -- Benjamin Franklin
We're a third of the way thru Inkhaven, and to celebrate, here are three of my favorites from yesterday:
Lucie describes a common viewpoint in French policy.
France is ready to stand alone
Eneasz describes the loss of memories.
Finally, Angahd describes Meditation as non-symbolic education ; always useful to remember in our symbolic labors.
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the practice of considering your audience.
When I am getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say and two-thirds about him and what he is going to say. -- Abraham Lincoln
Signore Galilei reminds you that You can just do experiments.
Linch argues that Middlemen are Good;
Middlemen Are Eating the World (And That's Good, Actually)
Margarita Lovelace recommends asking for what you want;
The Art of Asking for What You Want
and Amanda types on a typewriter.
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the virtue of just doing it.
If I had been asked to write 1,200 words for a newspaper tomorrow, on any subject, I would just do it rather than leave a white hole in the page. And I think it's a very healthy attitude to take to writing anything. -- Tom Stoppard
As of this writing with two hours left in day 9, 28 out of 41 residents have published their post. Still, every blogger remains, dutifully posting, as we near the 1/3 mark.
Here are some highlights from day 8:
Justin Kuiper asks why YouTube doesn't have serious competition for long-form videos.
Jenn calls for actual engineering, and not social engineering, to solve the declining fertility rate.
And David Gros teaches you how to Vibecode data visualizations.
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the virtue of authenticity.
"You come to the sobering realization that things will never stop from keep happening constantly." -- Andrew Hussie
The first week comes to a close, with all bloggers still steadily blogging. More and more publish between the hours of 11pm and midnight. Highlights from yesterday:
Ben Goldhaber examines Unexpected Things that are People , and why people chose to include them in the category.
Signore Galilei writes Some ballad poetry, just to amuse myself , which might amuse you as well.
On a more somber note, Nikola Jurkovic is Mourning a life without AI.
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the virtue of curiosity.
"Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible." -- Richard Feynman
Did you know that Substack has a neat embedding for Substack links? Linch discusses the pros and cons of loving your enemies; Lucie discusses what it looks like to view every communications problem as a nail and "Use Slack" as your hammer; and Kave discusses what optimization feels like from the inside, and how to notice when you need to make tradeoffs.
Know Your Enemy, Love Your Enemy
The 10 Principles of Slack Maximalism
Residents blog places besides Substack as well. Also on the subject of optimization, Screwtape asks: Did you know you can just buy blackbelts? Mahmoud Ghanem discusses Ove Arup's 1967 speech about progress, computers, and staying human in an age of automation. I think it's often underappreciated how long our current era of technological progress has been going on, and how much people writing and talking sixty years ago were thinking about things that are happening today. TsviBT contemplates Love after the singularity.
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the virtue of upholding commitments.
Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort. -- Paul J. Meyer
The residents continue to write, but the times the pieces are published are creeping closer and closer to midnight. How long will all of them continue to rise to the challenge?
Some highlights from day 5:
Alex Altair argues People should be smaller.
In the opposite direction, William Friedman considers arguments that states should be bigger, asking Why Is There Not A Single Planetary Super-State?
Justin Kuiper steps thru How better VFX led to better practical effects.
Alongside the residents are coaches, contributing writers, and some of the Lightcone staff. Kave Rennedy is joining us this week, and tells the tale of The Spectre.
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the virtue of punctuality.
You may delay, but time will not. -- Benjamin Franklin
"Where was the spotlight?" you might have asked yesterday. "Didn't everyone have to write a blog post every day?"
Yes, we did, and we did write those. But on the spotlight, as Ben Goldhaber might put it, I dropped The Ball. (Look, I'm a writer, not a project manager.)
Face the Ick by Lucent describes the concept of "face" and why people might want other people to be tracking it (and not causing them to lose it).
On a more practical note, Angadh Nanjangud writes On Submitting Your Research to a Journal, hoping to demystify the process for outsiders (who might think they're missing credentials they don't actually need, and not realize they're missing an important part of the format).
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the power of recovery.
Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Linch argues that we skip phase 3 trials for vaccines, which face a more challenging efficacy test than regular drugs do. (You know who already has a condition that a medicine might treat, but not who will be exposed to a disease a vaccine might prevent.)
Kuiper claims YouTubers are worried about AI for the wrong reasons, which explores some of the different sorts of YouTube videos that exist, and how AI will or won't impact them.
In other AI news, Hauke Hillebrant asks: Is AI scaling hitting diminishing returns? Relatedly, Nikola Jurkovic asks: Are we in an AI bubble?
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the power of habit.
Men's natures are alike; it is their habits that carry them far apart. -- Confucius
Inkhaven pieces cover a broad range of topics. Four that stood out to me from yesterday, which also stand apart from each other:
Justin Kuiper asks: What do Matt Levine, Scott Alexander, and Patrick MacKenzie have in common? The answer is surprising--well, not like that.
Amanda Luce says "You're not sick enough for this medicine." At least, that's what your doctors might tell you, as the predictable outcome of their epistemological approach, which you might want to take less seriously than they do.
In The Sublime Luxury of Saying No , Justin Miller describes a structural difference in coordination which affects the AI policy debate, and how to react accordingly.
Claire Wang shares A glimpse of the other side. Writing is about sharing experiences; sometimes those are dramatic insights or clever models, and sometimes it's that people live in different worlds, and you can decide which world you want to live in.
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the virtue of diligence.
What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence. -- Samuel Johnson
The first post was published at 2:55 AM, by a night owl who arrived at the workshop early; the last post was published at 11:53 PM, by someone who wanted to get the last details right. At Opening Session, eukaryote told the residents that "they all understand how time works", when talking about how much slack we would cut them if they published just after midnight instead of just before, and: they all understood how time worked!
We've been busy writing more, and having more conversations, and writing even more, and this particular newsletter is coming in just under the wire, with the other time understanders.
Three pieces from day 1 that I wanted to highlight:
**Personas of Local Maxima **by Lucent investigates commitment to the bit; why do people adopt personas? How are they caused by the forces of someone's environment?
Architecting Reality by HumanInvariant considers the act of building the world in which other people operate, and how the subtle power of doing so can lead to immense power thanks to global scales.
LLM-generated text is not testimony by TsviBT examines why you might care about words, and whether LLM-generated text currently has that property.
Inkhaven is brought to you by WordPress.com and the virtue of ambition:
"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."
― Theodore Roosevelt, Strenuous Life
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The Inkhaven Blogroll is live--Residents are publishing!
You might think that truly great creative works only come when the moment is right; when three of the right ideas bump into each other in someone's mind at the right moment, in the right time of day for a bit of pondering, and then the mind that owns them puts in the weeks and months of effort in order to fully flesh out the details and designs, leaving with a magnum opus.
But this would be wrong. Many successful artists and creatives simply sit down and force it out of themselves. Musician Ed Sheeran states that he simply writes 4 songs a day, and knows that while most of them aren't good, his best hits have all come that way. Pablo Picasso reportedly produced a painting every day, saying "Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working."
That's all well and good for art and music, but does it work for blog posts? After announcing the Inkhaven Residency, where people could pay a few thousands dollars to live at Lighthaven amongst others, receiving little bits of advice from writers who have successfully produced good writing, we received over 150 applications. After reviewing them I sent out offers to 50, and ended up with 40 people here.
And who do we have exactly? You might expect that for an onerous program that (at full price) costs $3.5k, takes a month of your life, and might kick you out on a day's notice, we would only get applications from people who had no other avenue to become good writers.
But no, we have the luxury that everyone we accepted has already written at least one thing that we loved reading and were excited to read more from them. There are some great writers among this cohort!
We have the winner of the ACX Book Review contest last year;the winner of the ACX Not-A-Book-Review contest this year; the primary writer at Rational Animations e.g. How to Upload a Mind (In Three Not-So-Easy Steps); we also have someone who wrote the dialogue for the videogame Necrobarista, a cafe where dead people come and hang out with the living.
"They say our coffee's to die for."
(Yes, they also submitted to last year's ACX Book Review contest.)
As well as rationalist/sci-fi authors such the author of The Company Man on LessWrong, which is now the 6th highest karma post of all time, we also have an internet legend in Ben Steinhorn. Ben taught himself to write stories by (1) finding a post on the frontpage of reddit, (2) finding a highly upvoted comment with few replies, and (3) writing a ~1,000 word short story (entirely unrelated) in reply. He did this over 50 times (!) until he was reliably getting 1,000 upvotes on the stories (example). But here I will highlight his humorous story from the perspective of a neck-tie.
I go home with woman. Wow! So many tie. I meet fancy tie name Ermenegildo. He is leader of all tie and think he the best. I challenge him to knot contest. I do my secret school knots and he quickly back off. Now I am leader of ties. Is important position. It mean I am worn most often. Oh I love worn. Feel of collar, dress shirt. Oh yes! To be worn is to be love.
Researchers
Turning a different angle, there are people doing very serious research. Alex Altair studies foundational mathematical theories of agency (his "Introduction to abstract entropy" was a winner of the annual LessWrong review), Hauke Hillebrandt researches economics and philosophy (see his attempt to predict GDP in 2050), Tsvi Benston-Tilsen studies human-germline engineering, and Nikola Jurkovic is a member of technical staff at METR.
Michael Dickens writes careful literature reviews of whether protests work, does statistical analysis of his own caffeine self-experiments, technical analysis of investment strategies, and critical reviews of books like Peter Attia's, finding mistakes in all sorts of related domains of research (sleep, exercise, nutrition, etc). But the essay of his I most enjoyed reading was the following:
In Which I Defend Fruit's Honor
Confidence: Likely.
I am here to clear fruit's name against the accusations that have been made. Fruit is one of the healthiest types of foods--perhaps the healthiest food group--and we should bestow upon it the shining reputation it deserves.
In another case of fighting back against common stances, Human Invariant is a young pseudonymous blogger trying to argue against common false beliefs, such as his essay steelmanning the case pro-consultants, pro-affirmative action, and pro-alcohol (all in one post!).
Philosophy
Basic philosophy is making a showing.
Mahmoud has neatly summarized in under 5,000 words everything interesting he learned in a Master's Course in Philosophy, with concepts like "Anatamopolitics," "Rigid Designators" and "Supervenience".
Tsvi has gone to even more basic philosophical concepts in his essay The Thingness of Things.
What's a thing, in general? Minds deal with things, so this question comes up in trying to understand minds. Minds think about things, speak of things, manipulate things, care about things, create things, and maybe are made of things.
1. Things
Examples of things: table, elephant, carbon atom. France, Martin Luther King. Insertion sort. Chess. Unicorn. Learning. Seven. Towel, strand, wing, crystal, finger, space, diffraction. The laws of electromagnetism. The first World War.
2. Non-things
What about non-things? It might be hard to list non-things because what we have words for, tend to be things. Redness seems like sort of a thing, but less so. Laws of physics also. Also ghosts. One might say "the ideal gas law is totally a thing" or "ghosts aren't a thing", though I think ghosts are a thing. Events can be things; WWI seems like a thing to me. But a minute ago I picked up my bottle of water and drank from it; that's clearly an event, a real one, but it doesn't feel that much like a thing. The abstract [drinking from a water bottle] feels like a thing though.
("This is advanced Thing-Theory" said a colleague of mine.)
For more philosophy, there's Vishal on the philosopher Jeff MacMahan's discussion of the problem of evil and wild animals' lives, Angadh on Thoreau's theories of civil disobedience, and Linch's Baby's Guide to Anthropics.
Curiosities
Inkhaven Residents have found many curiosities in the world to write about. For an example see Sean Carter's essay on the history of Bishop's Castle, a beautiful castle built by a crazy high-school dropout on the roadside in Colorado.
Bishop hoped that the castle would be "a place of freedom, hope, and justice." I have already mentioned how the bureaucratic attacks on the castle led him to see it as a monument to the people.
While this attitude at times bled into insanity, I still have to admit how impressed I am by his dogged devotion to the people. He felt the idea for the castle belonged to the public and so never charged for entry. The castle has served the public many times: by 1980, there had already been nine weddings, two baptisms, a wedding anniversary, a funeral, and an internment. People have bought engraved stained-glass panels in the castle as memorials for their loved ones. I think the castle lives up to its reputation as a populist monument.
"ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK. WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR SAFETY! BISHOP CASTLE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION! WE RESERVE OUR RIGHT TO FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND EXPRESSION! YOU MIGHT EXPERIENCE STRONGLY EXPRESSIVE BEHAVIOR!" -- Actual sign at Bishop's Castle
AI
AI is a common focus. From an exhortation to build your own LLM system prompt ("Do you even have a system prompt? (PSA / repo)"), an analysis of the self-image of an LLM ("GPT-4o draws itself as a consistent type of guy") to vignettes of a life working at a modern chip fab ("Zen and the Art of Semiconductor Manufacturing"), we also have fictional accounts, such as Sean Carter's supposed letter from Lucifer to his fellow devils ("Natural Intelligence is Overhyped"):
My dear friends,
It's hard to believe that, even before we began our great project, there were already calls to pause or limit the development of Natural Intelligence (NI). Even my smarter colleagues babbled about how the rapacious monkeys will "spread and mow down our prior works both vegetable and animal." Nowadays, the question is more whether they will even avoid freezing to death. It's just another sign that NI is nowhere close to living up to the hype.
Before I go further, let's clarify what exactly the fuss is about. Here we have the weakest type of ape ever developed. They are not only more feeble than their ancestors, but also have weaker stomachs, stunted claws, and less individual hardiness. People usually acknowledge this but insist that "you have to see them together!," as if the apes formed a hive mind better than insects.
In reality, the apes' social capabilities have been greatly exaggerated. Their behavior hardly differs from that of the other ape species. They travel in packs where they are hunted more often than they hunt. They fight other packs and each other for dominance. They are competitive by nature and cooperative only in certain circumstances. Calling this behavior 'intelligent' is nothing but marketing.
We've seen this show before. Consider the octopus, who a few millions of years ago was hailed as a new frontier. Many said that octopi would find a way to spread into the open oceans and even dry land. Neither happened and neither will. Octopi are relatively clever, and of course they are well-adapted to their environment, but hardly "self-adapting" as some claimed at the time. Everyone who thought the octopus would take over the world has now conveniently forgotten their prediction.
[…]
Warmly,
-- Lucifer
Art
We also have a great assortment of artists.
Nomads & Vagabonds made all the art for The Intelligence Curse
Markus Strasser has been making a lot of unique AI-generated animations.
Professional Experiences
Some applicants weren't very good at gaming the system. Jenn submitted an application that, while it did mention her policy research with Zvi Mowshowitz at Balsa Research, entirely failed to mention her essay **Things I Learned by Spending Five Thousand Hours In Non-EA Charities **giving advice from her years working in the Samaritans and in large food-banks, that was a winner of the LessWrong review in 2023:
Institutional trust unlocks a stupid amount of value, and you can't buy it with money. Lots of resources (amenity rentals; the mayor's endorsement; business services; pro-bono and monetary donations) are priced/offered based on tail risk. If you can establish that you're not a risk by having a longstanding, unblemished reputation, costs go way down for you, and opportunities way up. This is the world that Samaritans now operate in.
Samaritans has a much better, easier time at city hall compared to newer organizations, because of a decades-long productive relationship where we were really helpful with issues surrounding unemployment and homelessness. Permits get back to us really fast, applications get waved through with tedious steps bypassed, and fees are frequently waived. And it made sense that this was happening! Cities also deal with budget and staffing issues, why waste more time and effort than necessary on someone who you know knows the proper procedure and will ethically follow it to the letter?
Markus Strasser has a long and fascinating essay The Business of Extracting Knowledge from Academic Publications which opens with the following:
TL;DR: I worked on biomedical literature search, discovery and recommender web applications for many months and concluded that extracting, structuring or synthesizing "insights" from academic publications (papers) or building knowledge bases from a domain corpus of literature has negligible value in industry.
Close to nothing of what makes science actually work is published as text on the web
You and Inkhaven
This is a crazy experiment, and you can experience it while it happens.
We've built a dashboard for you to track the daily blogposts of every Inkhaven Resident at the Inkhaven Website. The dashboard links to every post that they write, and updates in real time as they get published.
Also me and my team will be publishing a daily newsletter (here at this Substack) highlighting essays and posts from the previous day of Inkhaven. You can subscribe to get the essays and commentary to your inbox daily.
There's also other ways to track things on the dashboard (RSS, etc.).
I encourage you to follow along with this social experiment! See you in tomorrow's update.
Subscribe to daily highlights of the Inkhaven writing, and commentary from the team.
My thanks to our partner WordPress.com for their support of Inkhaven.
Welcome to Inkhaven! The writing residency starts tomorrow and residents have already begun to arrive at Lighthaven, our campus in Berkeley. As we eagerly anticipate a month of new conversations, new thoughts, and new words, we thought we'd kick off the month with a look at some of the things our residents have already written.
I'm Vaniver, one of the coaches, and I'll be bringing you the daily spotlight during the month here on this substack.
Here are some of my favorites, split out by type:
Fiction: The Company Man by Tomas Bjartur, a fictionalized account of how AI development might go and some of the archetypes that might be involved.
Non-AI nonfiction: First, do no harm - how the FDA crippled America's response to COVID-19 by Ben Goldhaber, a look at the FDA's performance during COVID and more broadly.
AI nonfiction: Current safety training techniques do not fully transfer to the agent setting by Simon Lermen (resident) and Govind Pimpale (non-resident), an experiment investigating a central question underpinning gradual alignment strategies, of how much transference we can expect between capability regimes.
How to write: Writing Hack: Write It Just Like That by Sasha Putilin, which suggests starting pieces by foregrounding the difficulty and the emotional stakes.
That's four posts, which is just 10% of our cohort. You can follow along with all of Inkhaven via this dashboard, which has all of the residents and will gradually fill up with their posts.
Inkhaven is provided at marginal cost to residents, with many receiving further scholarships, which would not be possible without others covering the fixed costs. We'd like to thank our partner WordPress.com for their generous support of Inkhaven; WordPress is a convenient and elegant blog and website host that has probably powered most of your favorite blogs for years, including those of many of our authors.
We're also supported by Beeminder, which is a goal-tracking tool that you only pay for if you don't make progress towards your goals. If you're following along by writing at home, consider tracking with Beeminder.
Finally, we're supported by Lightcone Infrastructure, which you can donate to. Lightcone operates LessWrong, which is a community blog many of the residents and staff have posted to over the years, Lighthaven, which is a conference and event venue where Inkhaven is taking place, and several other infrastructure projects.
If you'd like a sentence or two about your company here, you can learn more about Inkhaven sponsorships here.