I'll Never Write the Same after Inkhaven

Mom blogger brings toddler to blogging bootcamp

Feeding our toddler at the Inkhaven cafe

After moving to Hawaii, I embraced my irrelevance. Everyone simply knows me as Baba’s mom or Amit’s wife. My line to the rest of the world was reading Aella (one of four twitter accounts I read), Gwern (another of the twitter accounts), David Friedman (who I’ve read since 2007 and who I wish would debate high-profile talkers like Palmer Luckey on tariffs), Ozy (whose insights make me laugh), Max Harms (whose masterpiece Crystal Society is poorly marketed and criminally underrated), and Scott Alexander (whose classics I revisit as a treat to myself).

They kept talking about Inkhaven, and I hoped they’d organize a remote or Hawaii or SF version because I didn’t want to live in Berkeley. I’d only been to the East Bay a few times and my impression was that it was too far from SF, and that Berkeley was a den of self-righteous, rioting, chaotic evil. But when I saw that one of my favorite writers, Alexander Wales (whose masterpiece I heard about from Caroline Ellison’s infamous journal), was going to be at Inkhaven, I applied.

My goal for Inkhaven was to befriend writers who inspired me. I was about to release my first self-published dark romantic fantasy novel, and the editing experience had been lonely and often boring. If I had writer friends who took writing even more seriously than me, then everything would be more fun.

After getting into Inkhaven, I came to the Bay early for my YC reunion. At the airport, I got a text telling me about my old co-worker. The news stuck in my throat for days like a dry pill. Even talking with old coworkers didn’t help. Due to HFT’s culture of secrecy, I almost never write about my trading era. But now I knew I’d have to write, so I could get the pill down.

In the days preceding Inkhaven, I prepared by reading the current and prior cohort’s blogs. Reading everyone’s blogs reinforced how not-online and not-lesswrong I’d grown. What were the odds that there were multiple bloggers in the cohort posting about etymology? This was why I’d always been on the fringe of Lesswrong instead of deeply embedded—I was weird, especially in Hawaii, but not as weird as these people. For those few whose writing I could understand enough to appreciate, I messaged them prior to meeting, bookmarking them as people I might fit in with. Despite my prep, making friends was harder than I expected.

On our first day, one of the bootcamp residents flattered and surprised me by remembering how CFAR once touted me as a “successful” participant. That must’ve been more than a decade ago. He was the only one to realize I had any prior connection to Lesswrong. To all the youths, I was a dinosaur mom blogger.

Claire criticized our cohort for having cliques. I wasn’t even with it enough to realize that we had cliques, but now that I knew about them, why wasn’t I invited? I wanted to be in cliques too! But I guess I wasn’t willing to put in the hours required…

Jasmine befriended everyone, including me, and I was grateful to have her. She even cooked dinner for Baba, one of my most stressful tasks.

But Amit told me I needed to make more friends. “That’s why we came here!”

“Jasmine’s enough for me. Also I finally met an internet acquaintance Aaron.”

“Go work in the kitchen so you can see people, not in our room.”

When I found something in common with someone, I was elated. I told Amit, “Avi went to MIT too!”

“Your favorite kind of nerd!”

But I doubted I knew how to make friends anymore, other than my strategy of being adopted by friendly people who did the heavy lifting for both of us, like Jasmine.

Baba and I would be awake before anyone—running around the kitchen island, smearing yogurt on ourselves, and bothering the cleaning people. Then the morning crew would wander in—Steve Hsu (whose blog I’ve read since 2008) back from an energizing bike ride and making a smoothie, the pensive Lily—still half-dreaming, Layla smiling, and eventually Jacob, who looked and acted every inch the serious, German, technical-writing triathlete. Everyone else seemed to be a morning person whereas I was just stumbling around keeping Baba alive.

Steve Hsu approached me over breakfast one day and demanded, “Does your HFT series end with [redacted]?” Layla exclaimed, “Don’t spoil it!” Meanwhile, from the title alone, Leo inferred, “Obviously, [redacted].” I’d never really thought much about titles, but after Leo’s comment and simply learning about the existence of Georgia Ray’s talk on clickbait titles, I put more thought into mine. Georgia reviewed all my first attempts at clickbait titles, encouraging me, “You’re someone who actually should use clickbait titles because your posts are interesting content that people would actually want to read.”

When Lucie—who built the daily submissions and calendar website at the speed of lightning—made us do feedback halfway through Inkhaven, I realized that I’d done zero social activities. Is this why I hardly knew anyone? Most socialization seemed to happen after midnight, and I went to sleep at 10pm because Baba always woke by 6am. Spurred by the data and my stated goal of making writing friends, I did my first social activity—watching Wuthering Heights with Vishal. After Vishal posted his review of the film, I posted my first “contra” post. I wish I could’ve attended Ozy’s talk on “how to disagree” before writing my post, because I immediately realized I’d made some mistakes, but I loved the experiment all the same. Thrillingly, Vishal also got inspired by the whole thing to write his own dark romance!

Although I didn’t really know how to interact with other residents, the writing advisors seemed obligated to interact with me. An eager student, I was determined to take advantage of this. I even sent Alicorn a second piece to review, despite her first review almost bringing me to tears (my doggedness earned me a mention in her blog). Inkhaven gave me the rare opportunity to get feedback on not only my first draft, but also on the revision. In my experience, most editors don’t work in this way—they give you feedback, then you do your thing, and then who knows who ever sees the revision. I think Alexander Wales eventually throttled my messages because I sent him too many things to read via Slack. In true algorithmic trading fashion, I then started messaging via another channel, which got him responding again.

The first talk I went to was Max Harms’ talk on tension. The title “Tension, the most important thing in storytelling” alone was illuminating, and he changed it to “Tension, the second most important thing in storytelling,” which I viewed as a brilliant way to add tension even to the title. Now I look at my writing prior to his talk and see how much editing it needs. I was amazed by how much Max had thought about story structure, and how much he was willing to talk to me about it. To prepare for reviewing my story, Max even watched the beginning of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Aww!

I kept missing Scott Alexander’s office hours because Baba got sick twice. Finally, Amit insisted on watching Baba so I could go to Scott’s office hours.

I’d already gotten My Toddler’s Secret reviewed by Alicorn and Justis, so I figured it was done. But Scott highlighted lines from every paragraph to correct. He kindly, clearly, and specifically taught us about parallelism, garden path sentences, and register, before telling me, “Good job. I loved it.” At the end, everyone broke out into spontaneous applause, which I’d never before witnessed in an office hours. Personally, I was moved and inspired by the depth of his OCD expertise on writing. As a less careful writer, I’d assumed that he had an amazing blog because of his powerful and unusual premises. Before he removed the scales from my eyes, I’d been blind to the meticulous craft that had gone into each word.

Sophie asked people to tell their life stories, and reading her transcripts was really fun for me, because it gave me a shortcut inside these people’s lives without having to talk with them personally. The stories were all fascinating. Some trends were clear—many of the Inkhaven people searched for meaning (and often found it in AI safety research), many had experienced mental health issues, many had grappled with loneliness, many were deciding what they’d do next—if anything, and many were weirdly smart to the degree they’d been isolated or basically institutionalized—all things I’ve blogged about! If their bios were true, I was surprised by how smart some of these people probably were. They didn’t seem that smart in normal life, but I guess that’s how smartness can be.

I felt freshly parasocially connected to everyone after learning their bios. I guess I did belong to this cohort, despite being one of only two moms and often feeling like an outsider. Maybe we were a band of outsiders.

When I did a podcast with Ben, he asked if I’d had experience with Lesswrong before Inkhaven. I’m much more into Lesswrong than any normal person, but less than people actually in the community. I first started reading Eliezer’s writing on Robin Hanson’s blog. After leaving my HFT job, I attended one of the first CFAR workshops, where I met Y Combinator people who encouraged me to apply. I hired someone I met at the workshop, and we got into Y Combinator for 2013. I forced all new hires at my startup to read HPMOR, and had multiple friendships that revolved around discussing it. I made HPMOR fan art and thus had my name included in its text. Eliezer chose one of my solutions for his final exam to include in the story, and I think my solution makes more sense and feels more satisfying than his. I hosted the South Bay HPMOR wrap party. I followed Scott Alexander’s writing from Livejournal to his other sites, and posted job listing ads on Slate Star Codex and found some of our first employees through that channel.

Aside from Scott Alexander, I failed to make the leap when Lesswrong grew beyond Eliezer’s sequences. Awed and mystified by how it grew, I watched from afar as Lesswrong grew and popularized its memes, from effective altruism to AI safety. I saw how everything the community had been into when it started became normal in Silicon Valley, and possibly beyond.

I told Ben, “Since building my family in Hawaii, when I read my favorite blogs, I feel like an outsider looking in.”

“But you’re at Inkhaven now,” Ben said.

“You’re right,” I laughed. “I’m back in.”

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Special thanks to Amit, and Amit’s friends Ashish and Devika. Amit decided to sacrifice his longing for stability to support my vision. Ashish and Devika got Baba into a Montessori daycare for the month, and lent us their bike and trailer to shuttle Baba back and forth. Also thanks to Matt for letting Baba sleep in his room in Bodega Bay. There are many others I haven’t mentioned yet but hope to in another post.

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