1 Week of Inkhaven Review (so far)
It's stressful to write two posts per day and not be able to speak
the start
On the 31st, I woke up in the early hours, left my home, and felt like my life was going to change. Having only read like 10 bios before, I spend the whole flight reading another 30 bios and their linked posts, and arrive in Lighthaven campus with with a sense of nostaligia.
I then realize my mind was muddled, and couldn’t match any of the faces and names with the bios until I asked. Then sometimes it would hit:
“Oh you were the one who was addicted to reading”
“Oh you wrote about social anxiety”
“Oh you had the cool weird fanfics”
“Oh you made the lifehacks list”
And as the days went on, this pattern continued it continued:
“Oh you wrote about NEPA vs Abundance”
“Oh you wrote the good freelancing guide”.
”Oh you wrote your startup lessons”
”Oh you wrote on correlated traits in shamans”
As I was here, I quickly became:
“Oh, you were the one who can’t speak”.1
on not speaking
Already day 1, people had some questions.
“oh you were the one who can’t speak! Sorry you must really hate needing to answer long questions, but [question?]”. No no no please I do like having conversations >~<. But it’s OK I would be confused too. I quickly wrote up a “Not being able to speak FAQ”. But the experience was non-trivial despite this.
Sometimes I would try to join group conversations. For the most part I was extremely unsuccessful (embarrassingly so). People in a busy room naturally filter out background conversation noise, and when I am typing on a laptop and my mouth is not moving, it takes people a while to even notice I am trying to say something, and even if I do type and TTS people just often speak over it and ignore it without even noticing. It makes me feel like I am demoted to status of listener and am locked out of every group conversation.
And I don’t really blame them either. Typing on my laptop is so much slower than speaking, less than half the speed, and that is before accounting for the fact that words sometimes are hard to understand, and that typos mess up words completely, and that I pretty often need to repeat a sentence. Each time I say something it feels like it was too late and the conversation has moved on, or just ignored, or at best, that the conversation needs to be put on hold to hear what the dumb2 catgirl has typed on her laptop this time, so that we can continue with the rest of the conversation.
I have had non-zero good group conversations, but only ever as an idle audience member, or from stealing someone from an existing conversation.
Yeah, I guess people could like maybe accommodate me more or something, but I also just hate hate hate the idea of people trying to accommodate me in this way, that people might be sitting in a conversation with me and slightly uncomfortable and thinking that there is a small part of them thinking “guh, I feel so bad for her that she can’t talk normally. I want to accomodate for her, but the conversation is just slightly frustrating and not as good at this slower pace, but I guess I will listen to her anyway out of pitty.” I just want to hold a conversation on my own merits.
I know it’s not personal. I had the same issues before Inkhaven too.
I just can’t wait to have my voice back.3
I do still manage to have some pretty nice conversations with people when I get to talk to people one-on-one.
LightHaven is, as a campus, optimized for making spontaneous conversations happen between people, for people to roam freely and join and leave conversations with freedom.
As I talk to someone one-on-one, some people would join.
Then I would shortly leave.
It’s frustrating at times, but I don’t want people stuck in a conversation with me if they don’t like how it’s going either. I cherish that I did have some nice one-on-one conversations at all. I don’t really want you to be pitied. I’m busy with writing and stuff too anyway.
So maybe being picky with what conversations I want to be a part of is useful too. But I just feel a low-medium level of stress the whole time I’m not explicitly writing.
on the writing
So other than not being able to speak, how has it been going?
It’s been OK. I’ve managed to keep up with writing two posts per day, despite it getting a bit stressful. We knew the rules going in: “Write 500 words per day. Before midnight. Otherwise you will be kicked out”. But I I had delusions of grandeur. I was planning on writing at least 2 posts per day, one on my personal blog, one on my wiki. I knew I would probably burn out some time, but that was a problem for me weeks down the line.4
The first day of Inkhaven was April 1st. Perfect. I had a post lined up that I’ve had on my mind for a while, “Dying with Whimsy”, as well as a real April Fool’s post: “carbon offset arbitrage opportunity”. I also wrote the first entry for my wiki. These were all pretty easy.
Beyond the first day, it became much more mixed. A re-occuring loop I need to fight is:
I am really interested in this topic and have a lot I want to read and write about it
I start trying to write about it, but realize that what I want to write about would take way too long to fully research and get written in full detail
I make a concession post, either on only one aspect of the same topic instead (“good outcome”), or on some completely unrelated topics (“bad outcome”)
My drafts folder expands with more ideas I want to work on
This still lead to some good posts on my main blog and on my wiki, but also some mediocre ones. While these are brewing and under-researched, I feel somewhat stressed that I have so much to do and so little time to do it all.
In any interaction, when I am listening or getting head scrithes, I often start having thoughts at the back of my mind thoughts:
“you need to post! you need 2 posts per day! get back to writing! get back to research!”.
It’s a non-stop loop in my head. Even as I write this, my head quietly races with “nooo!!! you should be writing a posts! what are you doing?!?” (uh ok, what do you think this is?)
And even after I finish writing my two posts for the day, I start thinking “I should be writing posts for tomorrow to get ahead!”. But I guess it’s just a feeling to get used to. And I do like the outputs of some of my posts. I’m quite all-or-nothing so I just need to learn to live with this and take breaks sometimes.
One good outcome, is what I would consider a good post on a subtopic of cryopresevation, which was pretty easy for me to write (even if I wanted to write something longer first5 )
In true Bay Area fashion, immediately met people interested in both organ sacs and whole brain emulation projects, and it was pretty interesting to talk to them about these topics. I might write about these a bit more too.
I now sit on a large variety of drafts on various topics which may or may not come out soon.
overall thoughts
It’s fun to spend more time again at the place where my AI safety trajectory started in so long ago. The hidden rooms and basements and balconies, that have changed and stayed the same as years go by. Spending time surrounded by giga-nerds of various stripes. And feeling like I have some purpose.
And it’s nice to get head scritches, go on adventures with people, going on walks and enjoying the California sun, play board games, having all the Soylent I could ever want. And feeling like I’ve managed to clear up some thoughts that I wanted to clear up and write up and post for a while is really nice too. It’s nice that I don’t have other work at the moment and can just focus on writing.
I’m glad to be in an environment where I am forced to think about things and make regular progress and outputs on things. There are things that could be going better, but I’m happy I’ve made good progress on both my blog and my wiki, which I would definitely not have made otherwise.
I would be lying if i said it wasn’t stressful to post twice per day, and that my lack of ability to speak didn’t feel isolating at times. I do sometimes get stressed by all the noise, and need to leave to have space on my own sometimes. But it’s worth it.
I’m overall very glad to be doing Inkhaven, and I am glad that I am being forced to learn how to do research more time-effectively and get things past the cliff of “80% completed” and actually post things and get things done.
And maybe I’ll be remembered for something more than “Oh, you were the strange catgirl who couldn’t speak”.
I don’t mind this, it’s an interesting experience :)
defined as not being able to speak
only 2 weeks left for this :) even if my voice will still be weak and hoarse.
foreshadowing?
I still to write an effort post comparing cryopreservation orgs, but the scope for that is much larger.