Opinion

In Favor of Inkhaven-But-Less

​Published on December 13, 2025 11:16 PM GMTThe ProblemOne of the main complaints I heard about the Inkaven Residency is that it put too much pressure on people to write too quickly. The fellowship was based on the premise that people who publish every day have historically gotten very good at writing. The problem is that ability to publish every day is strongly correlated with latent potential as a writer and ability to publish good things every day; people tend to publish only what they feel good about, so if someone is publishing every day, then many of them can likely produce things they feel good about very quickly.When you actually try to make people write every day in hopes of making them into people who can publish high-quality thing frequently, then you run into Goodhart’s law:Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.Or more commonly,When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.There is, however, a countervailing force, which made Inkhaven less bad than the above reason would suggest: practicing writing often makes you better at writing. Not always enough to make up for immense time pressure, but enough to do something at all.The ExperimentsHalfhavenThe Halfhaven camp took the Inkhaven format but modified it to be fully remote and with posts required every other day, intended for those who “have a school / job / family / other excuse, and can’t simply take a month off.”It’s hard for me to tell with this rich and plentiful data, but I also suspect that Halfhaven created higher quality posts, since there are more people who can publish a good post every other day than there are people who can publish a good post every day. Some people take longer to think of good things, or tend to write about things that take more effort and time per unit blog-goodness, such as research or talking to a thousand people[1].My 1/7thHavenFor the past ~4 months, since early August 2025, I’ve been writing a post every week, with two exceptions, once for a reasonable excuse and once for simply failing to Do The Thing. Instead of being kicked out of the program for failing to post, I simply lost[2] a small amount of money, calibrated to be the least amount of money that would get me to reliably post something.I feel like this has allowed me to make much higher-quality writing that often requires significant research and developing new ideas, while also pressuring me to put out my shorter-form ideas.ConclusionGoing for writing extremely often is not always the best strategy, but writing as fast as you can sustain makes you better at writing. Balancing frequency with quality standards is important. I would like to see more people doing commitment devices, but I don’t want people to be scared off by the reports of Inkhaven being too difficult for some people.^Although that particular author seemed to have done that very quickly, so maybe this isn’t a good example.^Specifically, paid two of my friends for the service of embarrassing me for not publishing anything.Discuss ​Read More

​Published on December 13, 2025 11:16 PM GMTThe ProblemOne of the main complaints I heard about the Inkaven Residency is that it put too much pressure on people to write too quickly. The fellowship was based on the premise that people who publish every day have historically gotten very good at writing. The problem is that ability to publish every day is strongly correlated with latent potential as a writer and ability to publish good things every day; people tend to publish only what they feel good about, so if someone is publishing every day, then many of them can likely produce things they feel good about very quickly.When you actually try to make people write every day in hopes of making them into people who can publish high-quality thing frequently, then you run into Goodhart’s law:Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.Or more commonly,When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.There is, however, a countervailing force, which made Inkhaven less bad than the above reason would suggest: practicing writing often makes you better at writing. Not always enough to make up for immense time pressure, but enough to do something at all.The ExperimentsHalfhavenThe Halfhaven camp took the Inkhaven format but modified it to be fully remote and with posts required every other day, intended for those who “have a school / job / family / other excuse, and can’t simply take a month off.”It’s hard for me to tell with this rich and plentiful data, but I also suspect that Halfhaven created higher quality posts, since there are more people who can publish a good post every other day than there are people who can publish a good post every day. Some people take longer to think of good things, or tend to write about things that take more effort and time per unit blog-goodness, such as research or talking to a thousand people[1].My 1/7thHavenFor the past ~4 months, since early August 2025, I’ve been writing a post every week, with two exceptions, once for a reasonable excuse and once for simply failing to Do The Thing. Instead of being kicked out of the program for failing to post, I simply lost[2] a small amount of money, calibrated to be the least amount of money that would get me to reliably post something.I feel like this has allowed me to make much higher-quality writing that often requires significant research and developing new ideas, while also pressuring me to put out my shorter-form ideas.ConclusionGoing for writing extremely often is not always the best strategy, but writing as fast as you can sustain makes you better at writing. Balancing frequency with quality standards is important. I would like to see more people doing commitment devices, but I don’t want people to be scared off by the reports of Inkhaven being too difficult for some people.^Although that particular author seemed to have done that very quickly, so maybe this isn’t a good example.^Specifically, paid two of my friends for the service of embarrassing me for not publishing anything.Discuss ​Read More

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