Inkhaven Blog Recommendations
I was recently a contributing writer at the blogging retreat Inkhaven. Here are some of the residents I think you should consider reading, and a sampling of their Inkhaven posts.
I didn’t follow everyone’s writing because there are forty residents and that would be Too Many. Exclusion from this list doesn’t mean someone is a bad blogger; it means that they didn’t send me a post for feedback, no one told me I should read one of their posts, and they aren’t a preexisting Friend of the Blog. If you’re sad about being excluded, consider sending me more stuff for feedback next time!
Two different people decided, as far as I can tell independently, to write a blog post in which they make up fake evil startups in order to dunk on Andreessen Horowitz for all their real startups that tear apart the social fabric. I can only assume that people who have the good taste to ask me for critique also have good taste in other matters. Here’s Justin Kuiper’s and here’s Linch Zhang’s. I like Linch’s better because I contributed some of the jokes.
Linch Zhang:
Strategies for winning at board games as a novice player. [Miyamoto Musashi voice] the primary thing when you take a board game into your hands is your intention to defeat the enemy, whatever the means. If you think only of collecting Victory Points or building your engine, you will not be able actually to defeat him.
How to improve as a writer: write a lot, get lots of feedback, and try to say things that other people don’t expect you to say.
Seven kinds of advice: the central principles of a field; small useful tricks; case studies; good questions; permission to do what you wanted to do anyway; diagnoses of what’s wrong; advice on how to avoid the worst outcomes.
Jenn:
WILD personal saga: Jenn’s father died, then his widow discovered he was secretly gay and in love with a man. And then he turned out to be cheating on both his wife and his secret gay lover with a bunch of guys on Grindr.
I was supposed to sensitivity read this one but then I forgot. On the other hand, my sensitivity read would have been “if Jenn’s dad wanted gay men not to look bad, maybe he should have made different choices.”
Canada lost its measles eradication status, but it has nothing to do with antivaxxers. Measles is concentrated among Mennonites, who are unlikely to get vaccinated. But Mennonites are actually pretty enthusiastic about vaccination if you explain it—the problem is that they only speak Low German and nurses almost never do.
In defense of the giant blue square in the art museum. (This is REALLY COOL.)
astolat’s “Robb Stark Fucks Everyone” fanfic The Pack Survives, considered as the highest form of the themes she developed over the course of her overall literary career.
Justin Kuiper:
As a regular Thing of Things reader, you probably know that Norman Borlaug saved a billion lives, but you probably don’t know how exactly he did it. It turns out to involve the role of elevation in Mexican agriculture.
Why milk costs $9/gallon in Hawaii. My reading experience: “wait, it does? That’s so weird! Why? Oh, that makes a lot of sense! Cool!” Real reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail hours.
Justin is a professional YouTuber with a lot of interesting posts about why YouTube works the way it does, of which I particularly recommend:
Best movie of each year 2000-2025 according to Inkhaven. I spent fifteen minutes Googling the years movies came out, running across the room, and saying “Fuck!” when it turned out someone had already filled a movie in for that year. You get a No-Prize if you guess which two movies I contributed.
William Friedman:
16th century imperial Japan and 16th century Hungary are basically the same country.
Every great power had its own idiosyncratic reasons for fighting World War I.
Countries can always make stupid decisions. There’s no law against it!
The world is always approaching and never reaching an equilibrium. This post is what talking to William is like all the time.
Tomas Bjartur:
Lobsang’s Children is a delightfully creepy little horror story; I hate to summarize.
Rational Teletubbies is a fucking amazing parody of rationalist fiction.
Skyler/Screwtape:
Social grace is a skill, and if you have social grace you can say true things and still be graceful.
Using index cards to remember things. I can testify that he does take out index cards in conversation to take notes on what you’re saying and it is as endearing as you imagine.
Why do super irrational people keep coming to rationality meetups?
Vishal Prasad:
Everybody should take creatine and here’s how to take it conveniently. I think this is the only Inkhavener’s blog post whose advice I intend to put into practice.
A beautiful personal essay about what it means to not be an ambitious person.
. Tsvi Benson-Tilsen
Stop making unrelated conversations about your pet issue while pretending that you aren’t doing that.
Science fiction story about the apotheosis of the LessWrong forum into the most stressful online community I can imagine. Fantastic worldbuilding. I hate it.
Good job writing about a utopia in a way that sounds even remotely appealing.
Deferring to other people’s epistemic and moral judgment is unavoidable but dangerous. Here are some tools for reducing the dangers.
Some considerations on creating simple social rules in complex situations.
Three thousand words on why you should STOP sharing LLM-generated text with people. Tsvi is doing the Lord’s work here.
Jesus Christ, Ozy. I'm trying to decrease the amount of time I spend reading substack publications, and now I've got a dozen more tabs open (𝘢𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘳 filtering).
In hindsight I definitely should have been able to guess the answer to “why is milk so expensive in Hawaii” without following that link.