Conclusions of my DIY Inkhaven

Epistemic status: describing my own experiment results. AI use: review, research (stats), fact-checking, grammar & light phrasing. I applied to the next Inkhaven cohort and was rejected. This was surprising and very unfortunate. While writing my application and answering why they should accept me, I felt like I'd one-shotted myself into writing. My goals were: • Run an experiment to verify my hypothesis that I couldn't write well. I also implicitly assumed that I didn't have anything useful to say or to add, so no one would read what I write anyway.• I wanted to get better at thinking, and to me writing is a better form of thinking.• I wanted to use language more eloquently even outside of writing.• Writing is meditative and deep work, so I wanted to become more productive by writing more.I was sad to be rejected, and I still don't know why. Fortunately, I have my agency, so I just decided to do my own Inkhaven instead. Obviously, I wouldn't stay at Lighthaven with a bunch of other people or receive guidance from people like Scott Alexander and Aella. Also, all of this is happening as part of my normal life, and I have other stuff to do as well. In reality, I started writing even before I submitted my application, because I needed samples of my writing and I wanted to check whether I actually enjoyed doing it. After submitting my application, it felt cool to just write until the start of the cohort. I could compare about 30 days of writing on my own with a month at the cohort with guidance. Also, I would have more writing to compare before and after. After the rejection, there was a temptation to just give up, but I decided to continue. Including this post on October 31, my totals are: • 21 posts on LessWrong: about 19,000 words and 109,000 characters.• Around a dozen posts on my private blog: roughly 6,000 words and 30,000 characters.The earlier 20 LessWrong posts have 740 karma across 441 votes and 95 comments as of October 31. These word and character counts excl