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Your positions are interesting thought I think you could do better than simply refuting a weak argument. "simulations without any suffering are incoherent." Is a position that's worth developing more on then you did in my opinion.

Since you're already considering the impacts of memory manipulation, I think you should consider the possibility of changing one's moral compass.

In addition to that, your arguments could do with being a bit clearer with well-argued premises and cleanly linked conclusions.

If you do write more, let me know, I'd be interested in reading it.

@Velaris I mean, yeah. These were Manifold comments. Not exactly magnum opus masterpieces.

The timing of this application was awkward for me. I have a lot of extremely disorganized notes, and I had just embarked upon a project of having GLM-5.3 Flash organize and file them in an Obsidian vault the day before Inkhaven was brought to my attention.

I was able to pull out some existing formal writing in my notes, but it was generally in weird modalities - two conversations with LLMs (which I used mostly to get myself to articulate ideas in presentable English, rather than using their sycophancy and straw man counterarguments to confirm the ideas, but that probably wasn't clear), one horrifically disorganized drafting file, and one long form post attempt that petered out around halfway through the planned content.

I could have revisited this material and rewritten it into a more presentable form by the deadline for the application (today), but I really wanted to have the notes organization project finished before doing that - being able to revisit all previous notes on a given subject seems like it would accelerate the outlining and drafting process considerably compared to trying to recall it all from memory.

As such I submitted the existing work unedited. These ideas were early enough in the writing process that they were more articulations of hypotheses rather than fully finished essays, and I hadn't yet done the reading to confirm, weaken or flesh out the claims. I did this because I was very confident that the ideas and writing quality spoke for themselves, but perhaps the ideas less developed than I thought, or the inability to produce a fully finished draft of anything was a huge red flag. I also have a full time remote job, which definitely didn't help my case.

I don't know if I'll apply to the next cohort. I still intend to get most of the material I was intending to write at Inkhaven finished and posted before spring of next year, so it seems likely to be a lot less useful for me at that time than it would've been in November. A big part of the appeal of this one was also that my friend @jim would be there...

@Plant

Thanks for the response, I updated my review

I ended up emailing 4 additional writing samples, as well as a list of Manifold comment links. One of the additional samples is this comment.