# A Statistical Analysis of Inkhaven

Okay, we got 41 people to do 30 posts in 30 days.

How did it go? How did they like it?

Well I just had 36 of them fill out an extensive feedback form. I am devastated with tiredness, but I have to write my last post, so let's take a look at what happened. Thanks to Habryka for vibecoding this UI.

Key Outcomes
------------

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/2de5858cb1c6a1ca9a258a23b11679f8c0825ba6ba1d5367.png)

Pretty reasonable numbers. For context on the overall rating and NPS, here are some other numbers for comparison.

| **Event** | **Average Quality** | **NPS** |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Sanity & Survival Summit '21 | –   | 65  |
| Palmcone '22 | –   | 52  |
| LessOnline '24 | 8.7 | 58  |
| Manifest '24 | 8.7 | 68  |
| Progress Studies '24 | –   | 63  |
| Manifest '25 | 8.2 | 33  |
| LessOnline '25 | 8.5 | 37  |

A little less good than the big conferences, and the NPS is a little better than this year's festival season.

From one perspective this is quite impressive; all the listed events are short bursts where interact with a lot of people you like and who are high-energy but rarely get to see; this was a month-long program that left people almost similarly excited.

Let's see the distributions for these questions.

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/7ec167633a90501caf3200602ffcf9368cd42d12e47c753c.png)

Mostly everyone rated it pretty high, and shockingly many people are excited to spend another month of their life and pay money to be here again. Crazy.

+++ Return Quotes

*I'd love to come back as a coach/helper.*

*im out of ideas for posts tho :(*

*I expect it's not the right idea for me to do inkhaven in this form again, because I think it helped me with what I wanted it to, but a future different one maybe!*

*once in a presingularity lifetime haha. *

*Pretty darn good. Any longer would have been a challenge to organize my life around though.*

*It was extremely important in the first couple weeks. It made me prove to myself that I could do this. But I have limited endurance, and it became extraordinarily hard in the last week.*

*It helped me confront my procrastination, but \*man\* did I publish a lot of garbage filler that I had to pull out of my ass for more than a couple of evenings. *

*It's definitely great to do it once, rating it 9/10 if it means doing it once. If you mean doing several such challenges, I'm rating as 7/10 — I would generally prefer to focus on longer and/or more thought-out pieces.*

*I want to effortpost but 30 posts in 30 days doesn't allow a lot of time to be careful with topics I want to be careful with, so I ended up not publishing the majority of the most prickly posts that I wanted to publish.*

*I think there needs to be more focus on getting bigger stuff done, I got pretty stuck in a pattern of writing a single 600-1200 word post each day*




+++

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/37def230152a828967575332f603732ae50df463e1808ca7.png)

The first question is rating how good the format of '30 posts in 30 days' is.  
The second question is whether they updated it's a better or worse format than they thought coming in to Inkhaven.

I was kind of expecting everyone to say that they thought 30 in 30 was great and much better than their expectations, but I think I was looking for positive updates more than negative updates, and in fact it's basically a wash.

Nonetheless, for the first question the average and median was 6.4 and 7 each, which is somewhat positive.

During the program I was very scared about changing the fundamental structure ("1 post per day"). I think the simplicity and schelling-nature of it was great. But all I'm spending my time thinking about lately is variants and changes to make.

> *It's \*even better\* than I thought. I'm somewhat used to daily blogging but not so much editing and not for so many days in a row. *
> 
> *I didn't realize it would be as strengthening of my "produce words" muscle as it was!*
> 
> *Going from inspiration to repeatable procedure has helped a lot.*
> 
> *a bit better. i thought it would be a bit more stressful than it was. but also i definitely didn't like having effortposts punished. *
> 
> *I think it's easier.*

How do people feel they grew?
-----------------------------

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/06379d924b1b12636b80a6b54341e88e0ecfdc824ac033b9.png)

For the all except the last, 1/10 was the null effect ('no change'). For the last one (whether your excitement increased or decreased) we made half the numbers be for if it decreased.

Overall these were all relatively strong, except for idea generation and articulation.

I asked a resident about idea generation. They said that they have tons of blogposts ideas, they came to Inkhaven to write. That makes sense.

Pressure
--------

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/cac2200ace343b22c69acb97a639981984c305877b1c81c4.png)

Turns out people want more pressure to do everything. My guess is that they imagine it would compete with them wasting their days rather than with time spent writing. Overall pretty interesting.

+++ Pressure Quotes

*More incentives to get reviews on drafts please!*

*I would have liked part of the day to be only writing*

*I liked the permission to write all day, I did not feel anti-social when I stepped away from conversations to pull out my laptop and write.*

*My writing always improved when I got feedback. *

*Residents should be help responsible for not exercising their own free will. That being said, perhaps more feedback-by-default mechanisms would help.*

*I'm a fan of opt-out not opt-in circles.  Make the default that people attend and I'm guessing their would be way more participación.*

*I wish there'd been more pressure to get a backlog*

*I should have been getting more feedback, but it's scary. I would probably have benefitted from more unsolicited feedback, but maybe that's not for everyone*

*I probably over-socialized. However I didn't mix it up as much as I would have preferred, I think. Pressure to mix would be nice.*




+++

Wellbeing
---------

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/f2a2b197860d4557ff0e98c3b298761936f2423348ce5814.png)

I don't see the stress level as necessarily a bad thing, I think it is a challenge and it will be intense.

I'd like to reduce exhaustion. I think it's pretty likely I'll change the deadline next time around to be earlier in the day.

I think the connection to the cohort should be higher and I'll fix some simple mistakes there early on in the program.

+++ Wellbeing quotes

Stressful first 2 weeks, then alright. 

Very stressful, very satisfying

This is a good number (7)

perfect amount of stress :') (6)

The Lighthaven artificial river helped.




++++++ Exhaustion quotes

gonna need some time off

Not tired by Inkhaven or writing, just tired by evenings until 1AM. I think you should dicensitivize those heavily before maybe the last few days in the future?

Definitely got brain fog from nonstop writing but I think it’s a good pain. 

Burned out a bit during the past week




++++++ Connection quotes

Hooray for new friends.

Pretty damn connected lmao. 

These people rock

I never really had the time to socialize with everyone and read everyone's stuff. I feel sad about this. I missed out.

Less drama than I feared from 20-something go-getters. Surprisingly relaxed environment with little status-jockeying.

I don’t try at all to connect, but it happened anyway!

i feel kinda weird about this number being low but i have to squeak my truth.... (4)




+++

Support Quality
---------------

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/1250f3b5c753e6216af867a176faaf6e8060137b039f3ce5.png)

I gave people the option to mention specific contributing writers that they found helped them. I'm grateful to everyone who came and was impressed by many; I'll mention the biggest surprise was the excellent and gregarious [Dynomight](https://dynomight.net/), who managed to be the second-most mentioned person while only being here for 4 days.

The contributing writers largeyl had fun here, and contributed many good ideas and conversations and feedback, but I felt that I never quite managed to get them really well utilized; that will probably be one of my top ~5 regrets for the program.

As for the coaches, uh, I was pretty busy, so I count for most of that red at the bottom (from not spending much time with my residents). Alas, turned out to be a mistake for me to try to coach people while running so much of this program.

> *I got so many hours of Gwern! He always has so interesting ideas.*
> 
> *I just liked these guys bc of vibes, not because they contributed to my writing (tho I did write a counterfactual short story bc of A. Wales, but he didn't like read it or anything)*
> 
> *A lot of them were good for bouncing ideas off, in addition to the formal feedback*

Bodega Bay Trip
---------------

One weekend the venue was rented out by a conference on AI consciousness and welfare. So that weekend I had to take everyone away. I took people up to the CFAR [Bodega Bay venue](https://rationality.org/venue).

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/9441afe77d01ba44ed3d5147f391139146d86f137cc5a234.png)

In-person, tons of people said it was like 2 weeks of bonding in 2 days, all compressed into a smaller space.

Most of the 5s and 6ses are people who didn't go (the question was mandatory).

Overall I will definitely do that again, and earlier in the program. But I will also plan better so that many people have the option of *not moving out of their room at Lighthaven.*

Sample comments:

> *It was so fun, and such a chiller vibe even with mostly the same people*
> 
> *Main drawback was the neck pain from not having a good desk setup.*
> 
> *I wasn't there*
> 
> *I didn't go, but getting kicked out was pretty negative.*
> 
> *I felt less productive after Bodega Bay and perhaps the blame is that I established good rapport with everyone.*

What was the best thing?
------------------------

This was a free text field. Mostly it was *actually writing,* and the people. You can see what people wrote in the collapsible sections.

+++ Writing (19)

I got a ton of drafts over the finish line.

The pressure and focus to write

Forced deadlines (although consider varying the format! force an effortpost! force two posts in a day!)

The intensity of getting to really try on something maybe would otherwise be hard to find structure to really focus on. I got some evidence I could make daily progress without gaps and make some posts many enjoy.

Forcing me to post every day

Post 30 posts

I got a lot of work done

having a month to write

I published so many posts!

Meeting people. I wish there were more artists

learning that I can in fact write daily like that

Just the accountability mechanism itself

publishing regularly

The commitment mechanism

Writing more, better.

Writing 30 days built self-confidence

structure for writing

Being sheltered from the rest of the world and able to focus on writing.

energy of lots of people focused on writing, not metrics or engagement farming.




++++++ People (16)

All the other people!

All the people were wonderful, and the space is great.

The people

Meeting everyone.

Other residents

The community

the friends we made along the way

the people

Meeting people and having conversations in a day I would not have in decades back home.

the people Ben selected were really some of the best people in a cohort I'd ever experienced in my life

The conversations

meeting cool people

Meeting people.

meeting the other people was amazing too, the little I got of how experienced writers write was great.

People.

Intellectually generative crowd, no monoculture




++++++ Feedback & Advice (4)

scott’s essay tear down sessions. Brilliant!

Plentiful feedback from everyone

pride in learning, having people respond to my work

Getting advice on how to write.




++++++ Other (5)

how amazingly responsive the team was to everything

Smash in the evenings.

kinesis2 advantage ergonomic keyboard. also the actually quite effective organization/ ops, all things considered.

Ben pace. I really think he’s such a good chap.

The all-hands every day at lunch and dinner. DO NOT GET RID OF IT THIS IS WONDERFUL




+++

What was the worst thing
------------------------

Not too many repeated buckets here.

+++ Venue Stuff (6)

I was cold a lot but maybe that was me

fake plants.

The coldness that's in many rooms (like E, C) at night. My body stops focusing by default in those context.

Also there's not many "cozy spaces" except the one on top of E and B. Maybe i didn't use them enough

Lighthaven. I know this sounds sacrilegous here, but I think it's an excellent conference venue, but as a place to live it has plenty of annoyances, and it is not a great workplace for a 30-day sprint.

My room was cold.




++++++ Screwing up the basics of life (4)

My inability to sleep appropriately.

didn't exercise

I missed my friends and family back home

Stress




++++++ Having a job at the same time (3)

Overlapped with my work schedule, I missed good experiences due to being in SF working.

Work stress

Splitting attention between projects




++++++ Assorted things about too much / too little effortposts, and ambition (6)

Daily schedule and my inability to focus on a long effortpost together with releasing something every day, hence doing the opposite of a barbell strategy for the most part: many somewhat effortful posts, with 800-2000 words and plots, zero big posts

I focused too much on my effortposts.

Personally I still maybe spent too long on some research project series

Well I couldn't make use of the program at all since I spent a lot of time thinking of what to write and then research and synthesize a theory. I guess it's easier if you just write posts like "13th day at Inkhaven" or "10 things about organizing XYZ meetups" idk.

early on it felt hard to find places to "lock in and focus"? Maybe the worst thing actually is a sense that there was even more potential we/I could have tapped into

not feeling like I'm as pressured to excel




+++

Takeaways
---------

I think I'll write some takeaways tomorrow.