A 30 day residency for you to grow as a writer.
For one month, you'll publish a blogpost every day. Or pack your bags.
Decision in 10 days
April 1 - 30, 2026
Berkeley, CA
$3,500 (incl. housing)
Scholarships available
"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."
If you want to be excellent at something, it's extremely useful to do it every day. Athletes, musicians, and writers famously live by this advice. Separately, one of the world's strongest motivators is to be surrounded by ambitious, like-minded people.
For the month of April, we're running a residency for talented writers to hone their craft by writing and publishing a blogpost every single day. We provide food and housing at-cost, so that you can focus on writing.
We'll offer whatever we can to improve the writing experience and help the resident writers grow stronger. In fact, we've interviewed many successful writers about what's helped them, and we'll aim to offer many of the things they described, through mentorship opportunities from celebrated writers, craft-honing workshops, and professional feedback. But all that will be optional. Your commitments are simply to be here and write.
Note: In the quote above, Scott Alexander makes an observation about a correlation he has observed. With this program we will be Goodharting on that correlation. Hopefully increasing the leading variable will produce more of the lagging variable, but of course, perhaps it will merely bring the correlation to zero.
After 30 days of publishing, we surveyed our residents about their experience. Many also wrote public reflections on the experience. Here are some of the things they said.
"Writer's block is fake now? I feel my mind extremely attuned to whatever happens in the day to try and spin something about it."
"I overcame a lot of my crippling perfectionism, and now I'm just excited to write!"
"This is the longest period of time that I've been in 'deep work'. Turns out I normally live in a state of constant low-grade distraction—the first week of its absence was disorienting."
"Having the coaches around helped SO MUCH. I am finally around writers who can give me good feedback. All I've had access to so far in my life were English teachers, who were always too overworked to challenge me."
"I have a pretty clear idea about how to search for interesting ideas, and write about it from an opinionated perspective."
"I feel respected... I like when programs treat their participants like adults, and care more about the substance than the niceties."
"I can see doing this a lot, and forever. I could not imagine that before."
"This was one of the best experiences of my life."
"What a terribly wonderful month. I loved it all and never wanted it to end."
Read more reflections from Inkhaven residents:
Get feedback on your writing from fellow Inkhaven participants, both 1-1 and in group workshops. This can happen as frequently as you like – including every day!
Share some of your essays with highly successful bloggers to discuss in a one-on-one setting, and get advice from them about the craft, your process, and what directions you want to grow as a writer.
Join workshops led by accomplished writers, on topics like research, editing, cultivating good comments, and more to be determined.
Work with professional editors and writing coaches who will help you polish your work and overcome creative challenges.
All of these activities are optional; the only requirements are to (1) publish every day, and (2) be present at Lighthaven.
Lighthaven is a beautiful venue designed for lots of small, quiet conversations in various nooks with whiteboards. It has bedrooms, offices, a gym, and gardens to write from.
"Lighthaven felt rambly and wondrous and fun without being pretentious? Felt like an incredibly-well-executed, 11-of-10 house party venue (laudatory) crossed with Disneyland.
I am still learning about cool things and spaces in the venue that I missed (there was a robot sand table?)"
Breakfast will be self-serve with food provided.
For lunch & dinner we offer hot meals, or you can instead get your own groceries from the nearby grocery stores just 3-4 blocks away.
Lunch and dinner can be purchased separately.
If the program costs would prevent you from participating, please let us know in your application. Substantial scholarships are available for those who need financial support. In our previous cohort, approximately half of participants received scholarships.
Highlighted posts from the first cohort of Inkhaven residents
featured on Hacker News and LessWrong
A delightful exploration of legal personhood beyond corporations—from ships that can be sued in court, to rivers with divine personhood.
A heartbreaking account of losing a father after waiting 30 minutes for an ambulance that never came. A meditation on institutional failure.
Why decision-making has gotten worse in some domains despite more information. The answer: paranoia as an adaptive response to competent adversaries.
Project management is about keeping the ball moving forward. Honor demands it.
A parent's practical guide to optimizing for the joy-to-mess ratio. Which toys actually get played with? Data-driven recommendations.
Hidden love letters revealed he had lived forty years in the closet with a secret partner. A tender, devastating story about family and identity.
Eliezer claimed bear fat with honey was delicious. One rationalist decided to test this empirically. The result? Maybe 6 or 7 out of 10.
A deep dive into the actual research on cold transmission. Turns out we don't have as confident knowledge as you'd expect.
Observations from coaching Inkhaven writers: sometimes your off-the-cuff posts get more traction than your careful essays. Here's why.
A meditation on unambition, jiujitsu, Roonian ambition, puzzles, and the joy of life at the margin rather than at the peak.
You have things you want to do, but there's never time. A practical guide to reclaiming your attention and doing what matters.
You can have kids and still punch the sun. Why fiction rarely shows parents as heroes, and what we lose by assuming kids mean giving up.
Vices aren't behaviors one should never do—they're behaviors that are fine in moderation but tempting to excess. Seven things rationalists often take too far.
One of the fundamental questions of rationality is "what am I about to do and what will happen next?" Social situations are a domain where this applies constantly.
When a new dollar goes into capital markets and gets bundled and lent, where does it end up? An exploration of where society's savings actually get invested.
"I will probably never buy winter boots again." A reflection on what it means that the world as we know it probably won't last more than a decade.
A rant on the right way to take creatine, and why all the other ways are wrong.
An open weakness: we assume those we communicate with are basically trustworthy. The community focuses on subtle epistemic mistakes while ignoring outright deception.
The act of creation is fractal exploration under optimal feedback control. Why the "last mile" of creative work keeps expanding.
Some fever dreams.
A theory of concepts: how to posit latent variables such that once you understand it, you'll say "yep, that's how latent variables work."
My dad worked at Bell Labs, and he never did anything cool. The famous research division at Murray Hill was different from the applied division at Holmdel.
Quick, better-than-nothing advice for people who want to make progress on the hard problems of technical AGI alignment.
Companies like McKinsey serve as professional scapegoats—allowing elites to outsource unpopular decisions while maintaining plausible deniability.
A satirical exploration of erotic fiction from a unique perspective.
...otherwise scope insensitivity will eat you. Part of a sequence of private Lightcone memos edited for public consumption. On making prioritization decisions.
The argument that Ricardian comparative advantage will provide humans with jobs in the time of ASI is old. Here's why it's a bad argument.
Humanity has a lot of unsolved problems—aging, disease, poverty. It'll be sad if superintelligence solves them all before we do.
An end-to-end evaluation of AI safety in adversarial scenarios. Testing whether language models can be manipulated into assisting with scams.
A candid, first-person account of experimenting with over two dozen different psychedelic substances. Personal observations on effects and comparisons.
A quick, practical test for ADHD tendencies. Part of a 30-day writing challenge—the kind of post that only gets written when you have to publish every day.
A collection of posts from Inkhaven residents on the final day, featuring diverse topics from fractals to fertility to Foucault.
Through the lens of Bughouse chess—where captured pieces become ammunition for your partner—an exploration of what happens when collaborators seem to mess up.
A deep dive into engineering and design behind building a mechanical calculator from scratch. Gears, carry mechanisms, and analog computation.
We'd love to have excellent writers and/or relevant professionals contribute to Inkhaven.
If you'd like to contribute to Inkhaven in some way, express interest with the link below, and we'll get back to you!
We'll fly contributors out to Lighthaven, cover expenses and pay for their contributions.
Yes, barring emergencies, you're committing to publish a 500+ word piece of writing on the internet each day.
It's very simple. It should have at least 500 words and a title.
First, it should be indexed on google, so someone googling the title should be able to find it. Second, the complete text should be publicly readable, and not behind a paywall or behind a login.
A resident not publishing daily will be asked to leave the program. This is because we care about the cohort knowing that everyone is working hard together, and we don't wish to keep residents on-board who are not maintaining this standard.
In some circumstances, such as emergencies, we expect to make exceptions, and we'll be a little flexible about single lapses (though we'd ask you to then catch up), but on the whole posting daily is a hard requirement.
We'll of course continue to provide housing and food for the period if that's been paid for. However people no longer participating in the program may be moved to off-site housing.
No. For example, you could write 5 posts in one day and then post those daily for the next 5 days, as you spend your time exploring writing your first piece of fiction (which you post on the 6th day). Generally I will definitely encourage people to write multiple early on to keep some in their back pocket for difficult days ahead.
That said, one of the goals here is to build a daily writing habit and a fast publishing habit, so I will also encourage residents to mostly publish the same-day.
"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."
— Jack London
I do believe that some people have more to say than others. But almost every serious writer I know has talked about how difficult it is to get started, how it feels like they have nothing to say, and how they have had to overcome this. They also often talk about how ideas beget new ideas (see the Paul Graham quote below). If you've written anything good before, or you're someone who we admit to the program, I believe you do have 30 days of blog posts in you.
I also find that the people I speak to who are worried about this are setting too high a standard for their daily writing. They seem to be holding themselves to the standards of the top 25% of their essays. Naturally, most daily pieces will be less developed than the pieces they spent weeks poring over. In LessWrong terms, I think it's fine to write a "quick take" rather than a post.
I do honestly think that, on many days, you will be able to get 500 words done before noon, and then spend the rest of the day developing other ideas and essays you've been working on.
And on the harder days, well, you'll be surrounded by 30-50 people who've also had hard days, and are wishing for you to succeed, and willing to help you. Ask Gwern for a blogpost idea, he'll have one.
"Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you're bad at thinking, you're bad at writing. But if you force yourself to write clearly, you'll discover you had more to say than you thought."
— Paul Graham
"The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better."
— Stephen King, On Writing
"The act of writing is thinking in public. The ideas don't show up before you start. They show up because you started."
— David Perell
The primary reason is that you want to do a lot more writing, and you want an environment that supports you in doing that. You'll be surrounded by people who take writing seriously, who want to do a lot of it and do it well. Successful writers will be around to offer advice, peers will be around to help you (and ask for help) when stuck, and you'll publish way more writing than you would have otherwise done in the month of April.
There will be people here who are full-time researchers or writers who want to get better, and people here from different career paths who have done a lot of writing but would like to expand into the direct-to-internet type.
The ideal Inkhaven resident is someone who:
The exact amount of time with advisors will depend on which advisors are relevant to the kind of writing you're doing, but you can get 30-60 minute individual feedback on writing from writing advisors three or four times a week if the writers suit your current writing genre and you are proactive about showing up, as well as near-daily feedback from our professional editors on-staff.
Probably with a part-time job, but not with a full-time job. Writing should be your priority during most of this time.
The in-person cohort is a necessary part of the Inkhaven Residency. The default expectation is that you will be physically present for the supermajority of April, though you can request an exception in the application (and we have made exceptions in the past, for instance for academics had university commitments).
Definitely some people will travel for some parts of the month. For these periods we recommend writing a few backup posts ahead of time for you to publish, especially for days when you're traveling and know that you won't have time to write.
On the other hand, it is good to find time to squeeze writing into your life, and this is also an opportunity to do more of that. Can you write a blogpost on a plane? Can you write one during a meal? And so on.
As people apply and are accepted, we will send them a booking link offering lots of different rooms at Lighthaven for different prices (e.g. shared rooms, rooms with en-suites, etc). People will be able to buy them. Solo rooms will be available for as little as $2,000; shared rooms from $1,500.
We will have more rooms than residents, so you will definitely be able to get a room (even if you apply late).
End-of-day March 1st, 2026
Please email me (Ben) at inkhaven@lightconeinfrastructure.com and I'll get back to you as soon as possible. Alternatively, just open the intercom in the bottom right and I'll message you back.
See what life is like at the Inkhaven residency—writers working, collaborating, and publishing every day.
