I published a post every day of November as part of the Inkhaven program, in which we are required to publish a post every day of November. Some of my readers knew that; others were confused about why I suddenly started posting so much.

If you’re an email subscriber, you didn’t see every post because I only sent out the good ones—I didn’t want to bombard you with emails if you were accustomed to my typical once-per-week-or-three-months posting schedule. If you want to see the bad posts, they’re all on https://mdickens.me/.

Inkhaven had 40 other residents; you can see their posts on the website, and daily highlights at the Inkhaven Spotlight.

Contents

• Contents
• Ranking all of my Inkhaven posts
• The urge to be the best at something
• Did I write good? Am I blog man now?
• Notes

Ranking all of my Inkhaven posts

Here’s all of my posts, ordered from best to worst according to the judgment of my brain. Feel free to leave a comment explaining why my ranking is completely wrong.

1. Where I Am Donating in 2025
2. Writing Your Representatives: A Cost-Effective and Neglected Intervention
3. We won’t solve non-alignment problems by doing research
4. Epistemic Spot Check: Expected Value of Donating to Alex Bores’s Congressional Campaign
5. Do Small Protests Work?
6. Do Disruptive or Violent Protests Work?
7. Knowing Whether AI Alignment Is a One-Shot Problem Is a One-Shot Problem
8. Will Welfareans Get to Experience the Future?
9. Alignment Bootstrapping Is Dangerous
10. Things I’ve Become More Confident About
11. My Third Caffeine Self-Experiment
12. Are Groot and Baby Groot the Same Person?
13. How Can I Not Know Whether I’m Having a Good Experience?
14. What If Ghosts Were Real?
15. Things I Learned from College
16. Upside Volatility Is Bad
17. Some little things I do to make life easier
18. Ideas Too Short for Essays, Part 2
19. Some Curiosity Stoppers I’ve Heard
20. Magic: The Gathering Arena decklists for people on a budget
21. An unnecessarily long analysis of one line from The Princess Bride
22. Prioritizing your objectives is better than grazing past them
23. I like reborrowed words
24. Wartime ethics is weird
25. I did Inkhaven
26. I don’t like having goals
27. Not-Discovered-Here Syndrome
28. Cash Back
29. My Carlin-esque list of pet peeves
30. Gaming keyboards are not good for gaming
31. Behaving non-awkwardly is NP-hard
32. In Defense of the NCIS Keyboard Scene
33. TV is better when you trust the writers
34. Why would God have a gender?
35. Belief in expert mistakes
36. Kid me was bad at Magic: The Gathering
37. How to fix Quidditch
38. How do I know if I’m dreaming?
39. the one with the long title

The one with the long title stands out as the worst because I wrote it as a gimmick. I had to remove it from the front page of my website because it makes the site borderline-unreadable. You can still access the post via the direct link, if you want to do that for some reason.

My most underrated post was “We won’t solve non-alignment problems by doing research”. It made an important point that was highly underrated before I published that post, and it continues to be highly underrated because the post unfortunately did not spark a revolution in how people think about non-alignment problems.

The urge to be the best at something

There are other Inkhaven residents who have written more popular posts than me, or been more insightful, or more heartfelt, or shown more improvement in their writing abilities, or done a better job at keeping up with what everyone else is writing (I only read maybe 30 out of the 1457¹ posts that Inkhaveners wrote this month). But by golly, I need to be the best at something, which is why I published 10 posts yesterday. Maybe I can’t write the best posts, or the longest posts, or the most posts, but at least I wrote the most posts in one day.

(My first draft said “I can write the most posts in one day”, but I doubt that’s true. I’m sure there are residents who could’ve written more posts than me if they’d put their minds to it. But I’m the one who actually did write the most posts in one day. Unless someone breaks my record by posting 11 posts today.)

Writers sometimes make an abrupt transition to a new subject that doesn’t make sense until later. For example:² I don’t watch much Twitch, but when I do, my favorite streamer is Maynarde. He’s not a big streamer but he fits my tastes well. We like the same video games and have the same stupid sense of humor³, and the people who post in chat are funny too. On my website I pretend I’m sophisticated and mature, but I’m actually a dumbass and Twitch chat is my outlet for me to act like a dumbass.⁴ Anyway, my point is, at one point Maynarde held the speedrun world record in Prodeus. Is Maynarde a world-class speedrunner? No. But he got the world record by being basically good enough to do a speedrun, and trying it before anyone else.⁵

That’s the trick to being the best at something: find something that nobody else is doing, and then be pretty good at it. That’s what I did. I’m good enough at writing that (on a good day) I can crank out 10 low-effort posts in eight hours. (Especially given that I’d already had all the ideas beforehand and written outlines for most of them.)

I wanted to write a post about Twitch this month; most people I know don’t watch it, and the way I watch it is pretty different from the typical Twitch viewer, so I feel like there are things to say. But I couldn’t quite figure out a thesis. So I’m just mentioning Twitch as a segue into describing the techique of being the best by doing something that nobody else has done yet.

Did I write good? Am I blog man now?

During Inkhaven, I finished a lot of post ideas that were otherwise fated to languish in my “post ideas” file. I had the idea about the philosophy of identity for Groot and Baby Groot in 2018, after watching Avengers: Infinity War for the first time. And now, seven years later, I’ve finally turned it into a post. Was that a good use of my time? Was the post worth writing? I don’t know, you tell me.

I also got the chance to talk to some talented writers and get useful advice and feedback. For example, Scott Alexander told me that I hedge too much.

When I was in high school, I did the required thing where you arbitrarily pick a thesis (regardless of whether you believe it) and then confidently defend it. I didn’t like doing that—I want to figure out what’s correct, not just prove that I’m good at arguing. When I wrote personal stuff, I made sure to make it clear what I don’t know, and avoided dogmatically arguing for one side. (I didn’t always succeed at that, but I tried.) But there’s such a thing as taking it too far, which apparently I do. Except for in this post, because Scott made me remove all the hedge words from that one.

I talked to Dynomight about my list of draft ideas. We talked about various things but my biggest takeaway was that I’m spending too long thinking about ideas before writing them, and instead I should just write them.

I got plenty of valuable insight from other people, but if I give more examples, then I will feel like I need to list all of them, and I will feel bad if anyone gets left out. So I will leave it at two, with the acknowledgment that I talked to many other great people as well.

Posted on Nov 30, 2025

Notes