Probably some of you will be pretty enamored with the concept of a writing retreat in which you have to publish a 500-word blog post every day by midnight or you get kicked out. Well, the concept is real! The inaugural such thing, dubbed Inkhaven [1], kicked off three days ago in Berkeley with 41 participants. On day 4 we’re down to 40. The prediction markets currently expect, as of me writing this, about 34 people to make it till the end on November 30. Here’s a [static] graph:
Or follow along with the firehose of blog posts.
The idea for this thing was born when Scott Alexander made the observation that whenever he sees someone blogging every day, they almost invariably end up successful in some way. Scott called it his best leading indicator of a good blogger.
The Inkhaven organizers are perfectly aware that correlation doesn’t imply causation, but, as the saying goes, sometimes correlation does “waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there’.” They refer to Inkhaven’s conceit as Goodharting on that correlation and explicitly warn prospective participants that committing to writing every day might merely bring the correlation between daily writers and eventual good bloggers to zero.
Goodharting?
Yes, as in Goodhart’s law, that any metric you try to optimize quickly becomes meaningless because people game the crap out of it. We’ve talked about it a lot on the Beeminder blog over the years. Like in “Ice Cream Truck Loopholes”, where we argue that Goodhart’s law doesn’t tend to sting you too badly when you’re the one making up the metrics. Trying to game them is like pulling yourself up by your own petard? Since you care about the underlying goal, you can just change the metrics if Goodharting is ruining things.
DIY Inkhavens?
I’m proud to report that Beeminder is a minor sponsor of the event. And I’m especially opposite-of-humbled to report that I myself have been recruited as a mentor/”Contributing Writer” for the middle two weeks of Inkhaven. My objective is to help participants set up their own Inkhavens after the retreat is over.
The foundation is, naturally, setting up a goal to graph your wordcount over time, automatically, and commit to some number of average words per day. (Unlike at Inkhaven, with Beeminder you can write more on some days and build up safety buffer. Unless you don’t want that, in which case there’s the autoratchet feature. Beeminder is very flexible.) See our old Newbee Corner blog post, Beemind Your Writing (By Word Count, Automatically), for the basics.
Finally, I should clarify that I’m not technically a participant myself. But I would crush it if I were. Inhumanly astute readers will notice it’s 11:59pm and this blog post (including this sentence, including this parenthetical) is exactly 500 words.
Footnotes
[1] Yes, “Writehaven” would’ve been a better pun on the name of the retreat venue, Lighthaven, but the name was taken by a different tool they built.