Writing About Writing: Highlights from Inkhaven

This post is adapted from an earlier and less Beeminder-specific version on LessWrong.

I returned from Inkhaven (see my previous post about heading there) a week and a half ago. It was intense and wonderful and I highly recommend it to fans of the Beeminder blog, if it happens next year, which it seems like it will. I should clarify that I wasn’t officially a participant myself. The organizers recruited me as a Contributing Writer, to share my decades of blogging wisdom. And to help with writing-related commitment devices, of course. It was quite an honor, given the list of other contributing writers: Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, Dynomight, Gwern Branwen, Andy Matuschak, and many others. The participants were no slouches either and included many friends and people I’m a huge fan of (such as Rob Miles) and others who I’ve become friends with and/or become a fan of.

With 40 posts published per day by participants for 30 straight days (1200 total! not counting those by organizers and contributing writers) it feels impossible to highlight samples of them. Fortunately that’s been done for me: the Inkhaven spotlight. And just to semi-randomly pick a single post to highlight, for making me laugh out loud, I’ll link to one by Rob Miles. And to non-randomly pick one because it’s somewhat about Beeminder, I’ll link to Lucie Philippon’s post about Cyborgs vs Mentats. It describes two schools of thought on incentive alignment. There are also myriad poignant, insightful, informative, and otherwise delightful posts. And, sure, plenty that don’t quite work yet. But that’s the point: force yourself to keep publishing, ready or not, and trust that quality will follow.

Which brings me to the two Inkhaven lessons for me personally as a writer.

First I need to follow the advice (#5 in my collection of Inkhaven tips) to dedicate blocks of time to dumping words onto the page. Editing is separate. See the version of this post on LessWrong for an embarrassing illustration, where I started with “here I am on the plane” on my way home from Inkhaven. It’s a terrible opening but the alternative was sitting there agonizing about a better opening, getting distracted, and having nothing written.

The second lesson for me in particular is that sometimes it’s ok to hit publish before something is perfect. In addition to helping the participants, and some amount of work on Beeminder, I committed to the same thing the participants did while I was there: publishing a 500-word blog post every day by midnight. It was hard! And sometimes — as above — something mildly embarrassing wound up in the published post because I ran out of time for the editing. But I also managed to actually publish fourteen posts in fourteen days. I link to the more Beeminder relevant ones below.

Write, publish, repeat.

When I got home I agonized about committing to keep churning out a post every day for the rest of the month. Obviously I needed to have created a Beeminder goal if I were serious about that. So far I’ve decided that my current blogging commitment is enough — biweekly Beeminder posts, plus my new AGI Friday Substack. I do have a pretty much unlimited number of ideas to write about, even sticking to the theme of writing about writing. Here are half a dozen of them:

1. Complaining about a list of words I’ve been curating for which Google’s built-in dictionary definitions are garbage.
2. What a work of art the 1913 edition of Webster’s dictionary still is and how to configure a Mac laptop so it pops up those definitions when you hard-press on a word with the touchpad.
3. Why Overleaf is the bees’ knees for technical writing or collaborative writing (and definitely what you want for technical collaborative writing).
4. More of my favorite word games (does that count as writing about writing? maybe I can find a way to make it count!).
5. My ever-growing pile of notes about and examples of redefining everyday words as technical jargon (“common knowledge”, “real number”, “normal distribution”) and how bad this is.
6. Tips for dealing with trolls (beyond not feeding them, which is rules 1 through 17).

The problem is how daunting it feels to do justice to some of those. But that’s where the writing tip to First Just Write comes in.

(Fun fact: I spent some hours today thinking today’s Beeminder blog post would be the one about my thoughts on jargon before I threw up my hands and realized my Inkhaven retrospective deserved a translation to the Beeminder blog.)

So let me end this with a recap of my at-least-vaguely-Beeminder-relevant posts from my Inkhaven stay:

1. Against Powerful Text Editors (mindless, repetitive edits waste less time than it seems and avoiding them is more costly than it seems — this is sort of a commitment device for not getting distracted by your own tools)
2. See Your Word Count While You Write (I made a tool, Tallyglot, to see your word count in various online editors)
3. Why to Commit to a Writing and Publishing Schedule (it matters for you and for your readers; also covers “how”)
4. Strategically Procrastinate as an Anti-Rabbit-Hole Strategy (aka Just-in-timeboxing)
5. The Eightfold Path To Enlightened Disagreement (characterize, crux, ITT, steelman, scout-mindset, etc)
6. Smarmbots, Secret Cyborgs, and Evolving Writing Norms (new rule: no plagiarizing LLMs)
7. Mnemonic Exposition (how to name and gender hypothetical characters)
8. Eat The Richtext (another tool I made for preserving formatting when pasting text)
9. The Principle of Delayed Commitment (more pro-procrastination propaganda — this one’s already on the Beeminder blog)
10. Ten Wrong and Dumb Grammar Rules (infinitive splitting, less-vs-fewer, syntactic vs elocutionary punctuation, etc)
11. Writing Tips from Inkhaven (listicles, curse of knowledge, Hemingway Mode, the out-loud-to-your-friend constraint, etc — two Beeminder users got $15 honey money bounties for two of these tips)