Inkhaven Spotlight #0

Application essays by the Inkhaven Residents

Welcome to Inkhaven! The writing residency starts tomorrow and residents have already begun to arrive at Lighthaven, our campus in Berkeley. As we eagerly anticipate a month of new conversations, new thoughts, and new words, we thought we’d kick off the month with a look at some of the things our residents have already written.

I’m Vaniver, one of the coaches, and I’ll be bringing you the daily spotlight during the month here on this substack.

Here are some of my favorites, split out by type:

• Fiction: The Company Man by Tomas Bjartur, a fictionalized account of how AI development might go and some of the archetypes that might be involved.

• Non-AI nonfiction: First, do no harm - how the FDA crippled America’s response to COVID-19 by Ben Goldhaber, a look at the FDA’s performance during COVID and more broadly.

• AI nonfiction: Current safety training techniques do not fully transfer to the agent setting by Simon Lermen (resident) and Govind Pimpale (non-resident), an experiment investigating a central question underpinning gradual alignment strategies, of how much transference we can expect between capability regimes.

• How to write: Writing Hack: Write It Just Like That by Sasha Putilin, which suggests starting pieces by foregrounding the difficulty and the emotional stakes.

That’s four posts, which is just 10% of our cohort. You can follow along with all of Inkhaven via this dashboard, which has all of the residents and will gradually fill up with their posts.

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Inkhaven is provided at marginal cost to residents, with many receiving further scholarships, which would not be possible without others covering the fixed costs. We’d like to thank our partner WordPress.com for their generous support of Inkhaven; WordPress is a convenient and elegant blog and website host that has probably powered most of your favorite blogs for years, including those of many of our authors.

We’re also supported by Beeminder, which is a goal-tracking tool that you only pay for if you don’t make progress towards your goals. If you’re following along by writing at home, consider tracking with Beeminder.

Finally, we’re supported by Lightcone Infrastructure, which you can donate to. Lightcone operates LessWrong, which is a community blog many of the residents and staff have posted to over the years, Lighthaven, which is a conference and event venue where Inkhaven is taking place, and several other infrastructure projects.

If you’d like a sentence or two about your company here, you can learn more about Inkhaven sponsorships here.