The Inkhaven Residency

The Blogroll

Today, 6 out of 41 residents have published

A.G.G. Liu
Latest Post: Tides are weirder than you think
Adrià Garriga Alonso
Latest Post: The structure of ML papers doesn't quite work for mechanistic interpretability
Alex Altair
Latest Post: Coffea arabica
Amanda Luce
Latest Post: What is a Luxury Belief, Anyway?
Angadh Nanjangud
Latest Post: Dating is not a charity
Ben Goldhaber
Latest Post: Working Notes: Google Veo3 Flow
Ben Steinhorn
Latest Post: Evgeny Kissin
Camille Berger
Latest Post: I love Ithkuil and IDrani
Claire Wang
Latest Post: the show must go on
Croissanthology
Latest Post: De-lurk from the internet
Daniel Paleka
Latest Post: My travel checklist
David Gros
Latest Post: Dev Notes 07: Additional Notes on Streets Analysis and Updates
Eneasz Brodski
Latest Post: TTT: Hobo Forest
Harri Besceli
Latest Post: I like Aragorn
Hauke Hillebrandt
Latest Post: Risk Of Great Power Conflict
Human Invariant
Latest Post: The Case For Alternative Ordering Mechanisms in Prediction Markets
Jenn
Latest Post: my dad could still be alive, but he's not.
Joanna Bregan
Latest Post: I’m going to protect my ideas like children
Justin Kuiper
Latest Post: Screwtape's guide to tempting the author: Hate the sinner
Justin Miller
Latest Post: Cool Stats Bro.
Linch Zhang
Latest Post: Aging Has No Root Cause
Lucie Philippon
Latest Post: Friendships I want to build at Inkhaven
Lydia Nottingham
Latest Post: Oxford Equilibrium: A Two-Slope Optimal Timing Problem
Mahmoud Ghanem
Latest Post: Fading qualia arguments can be more finely grained than the neural level
Margarita Lovelace
Latest Post: How to Enjoy Mondays and Survive Emotional Bankruptcy by Harnessing the Power of the Sun Gods
Markus Strasser
Latest Post: A first look at Rubrics for Creative Writing
Michael Dayah
Latest Post: Craving Food Noise
Michael Dickens
Latest Post: Are Groot and Baby Groot the Same Person?
Mikhail Samin
Latest Post: Prediction markets for social deduction games
Nikola Jurkovic
Latest Post: Common elements of AI takeover scenarios
Raye
Latest Post: Up for Consideration: Lying to Your Doctor
Rob Miles
Latest Post: Basic Celestial Navigation is Hilariously Easy
Sasha Putilin
Latest Post: Finding My Internal Compass, Literally (11/30)
Sean Carter
Latest Post: Analog Writers Who Inspire Me
Simon Lermen
Latest Post: The Term Recursive Self-Improvement Is Often Used Incorrectly
Skyler
Latest Post: Better than Baseline
Tomás Bjartur
Latest Post: Rubber Souls
Tsvi Benson-Tilsen
Latest Post: What is God? The second day
Vasco Queirós
Latest Post: Why Kind Words Don't Last
Vishal Prasad
Latest Post: Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall: Women, Domesticity, Craft
William Friedman
Latest Post: The Greatest Immigration Crisis In History

Contributing Writers, Coaches & other Chroniclers

Abram Demski
Latest Post: Teleosemantics & Swampman
Ben Pace
Latest Post: 5 Things I Learned After 10 Days of Inkhaven
Daniel Reeves
Latest Post: Why to Commit to a Writing and Publishing Schedule
Justis Mills
Latest Post: Personal Sustainability is Overrated
Kave Rennedy
Latest Post: Does evolution select for mass?
Ozy Brennan
Latest Post: Book Review: Plasticosis
Raymond Arnold
Latest Post: One Shot Singalongability is an attitude, not a skill, or song-difficulty-level.
Sacha Witt
Latest Post: Personhood as Republic
Vaniver
Latest Post: Why I am not a militarist

Latest Posts

November 11, 2025

November 10, 2025

A Thesis Regarding The Impossibility Of Giving Accurate Time Estimates, Presented As An Experiment On Form In Which The Essay Solely Consists Of A Title; In Which The Thesis States That, If Task Times Follow A Pareto Distribution (With The Right Parameters), Then An Unknown Task Takes Infinite Time In Expectation; And Therefore, In The General Case, You Cannot Provide An Accurate Time Estimate Because Any Finite Estimate Provided Will Not Capture The Expected Value; And, More Precisely, Every Estimate Will Be An Underestimate, Because Every Number Is Smaller Than Infinity; And This Matches With The General Observation That, When People Estimate Task Times, They Usually Underestimate The True Time; However, In Opposition To This Thesis Are At Least Two Observations; First, That Even If Tasks Take Infinite Time In Expectation, The Median Task Time Is Finite, And An Infinite-Expected-Value Task-Time Distribution Does Not Preclude The Possibility That Time Estimates Can Overestimate As Often As They Underestimate, But People Fail To Do This; Second, That Certain Known Biases That Result In People Underestimating The Difficulty Of Tasks, Such As Envisioning The Best-Case Scenario Rather Than The Average Case; However, In Defense Of The Original Thesis, Optimism Bias And The Pareto-Distributed Problem Space May Be Two Perspectives On The Same Phenomenon; But Even If We Reconcile The Second Concern With The Thesis, We Are Still Left With The First Concern, In Which An Unbiased Estimate Of The Median Time Should Still Be Possible, But People Are Overly Optimistic About Median Task Times; Thus, Ultimately Concluding That The Thesis Of This Essay--Or, More Accurately, The Thesis Of This Title--Is A Faulty Explanation Of People's General Inability To Provide Accurate Time Estimates; Then Following Up This Thesis With The Additional Observation That We Can Model Tasks As Turing Machines; And The Halting Problem States That It Is Impossible In General To Say Whether A Turing Machine Will Halt, And As A Corollary, It Is Impossible In General To Predict How Long A Turing Machine Will Run For Even If It Does Halt; So Perhaps The Halting Problem Means That We Cannot Make Accurate Time Estimates In General; However, It Is Not Clear That The Sorts Of Tasks That Human Beings Estimate Are Sufficiently General For This Concern To Apply, And Indeed It Seems Not To Apply Because Some Subset Of People Do In Fact Succeed At Making Unbiased Time Estimates In At Least Some Situations, At Least Where 'Unbiased' Is Defined Relative To The Median Rather Than The Mean; It Is Difficult To Say In Which Real-Life Situations The Halting Problem Is Relevant Because It Is Not Feasible To Construct A Formal Mathematical Proof For Realistic Real-Life Situations Because This Would Require Creating A Sophisticated Model In Which The State Of The Universe Is Translated To A Turing Machine, Which Would Be An Extremely Large Turing Machine And Probably Not Feasible To Reason About; Leading To The Conclusion That This Essay's Speculation Led Nowhere

November 9, 2025

November 8, 2025

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November 1, 2025

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