Last month was the replication cohort of Inkhaven — an experiment to test whether cults are conducive to writing.

Sorry, I heard we’re not supposed to use the c-word anymore. They’re called “high-demand groups” now. The demand was to publish 500 words each day or you get kicked out of the compound and the glorious leader is disappointed and you may as well just have Claude write for you from now on since you don’t have what it takes to join that most elevated caste of rationalists: a blogger.

Earlier, my friend asked me if she should apply. I said that you get three meals a day and it’s probably a good place to find a husband. She chickened out. But everyone who attended did seem to turn 3 meals into 500 words consistently and had a good time of it. The replication came in: Cults work!

The last post on Putanumonit was me looking for a job. I suggested that if you read between the lines of my decade of writing, you may discern a product/ops person with good thinking skills (for a human). Thinking Machines Lab decided to read my actual lines instead of between them and hired me as a writer.

11 years ago I worked in banking regulation, an industry so boring it blows up the world economy every couple of decades just to feel something. I was stuck on a dead end client project with nothing to do but read LessWrong all day and dream of being a bloggerat. So I started Putanumonit. This has led directly to me getting an awesome job in an industry so exciting we’re definitely not going to blow the world up.

Feeling that I owe a debt to the blogging cult that raised me, I asked the LessWrong team if I could come volunteer at Inkhaven to review people’s blogs, share some tips, and describe the weird path my writing career took. I was informed that they aren’t interested in working with someone employed by an “AI capabilities company”. I suggested it would be nice if they wrote down which AI capabilities in particular are doomy, given that every single tech company today is trying to make some AI more capable at something, and whether what Thinky is developing is particularly villainous. I didn’t get a response — perhaps they are short on writers.

This leaves me no recourse but to start my own miniblogging series on writing and AI capabilities. I think about this subject every single day! I won’t publish every day, though, because:

  • I have a full time job and two kids and video games.
  • I eat two meals a day at most.
  • I apparently no longer meet the high demands of my high demand group anyway, so
  • I actually became a post rat back in 2019 after, uhhh, this happened. So I joined the post rat writing cult over at Ribbonfarm and they only made me write 300 words once a week which gave me more time to think new thoughts while sticking to the same subject for several months.

I’m expected to disclaim here that none of my ideas on AI and writing reflect those of my employer except my employer pays me to have ideas about AI and writing so if I come up with any good ones I’m certainly going to tell everyone at work and see if we can train a model that’s great at coaching people to write well. Until I have successfully self-automated, you’ll have to make do with reading this blog.

Welcome back to Putanumonit, human-written since 2015.

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