(2025-12-14) My Work With Chris Lakin

Rival Voices: My Work with Chris Lakin.

Six months ago

could I get a sweet gig making money online?
Turns out I could. A few people reached out and we started working together. Among them, Chris Lakin.

the first thing I learned was just how much knowledge is private. I already sorta knew this to be true, I just didn’t believe it.

I was really impressed by Chris’ private knowledge system. It takes the form of a Discord server with 40 people on it that works like a decentralized exobrain. Which I know sounds so cringe, but I think is actually the right way of thinking about it. He’s very disciplined, using categories, channels, and threads inside of channels to keep each topic tidy, and using a tiny set of norms to keep others from making it into a mess. (social warrens)

it’s very hard to convey just what is so good about this Discord knowledge engine because it is metis through and through: tacit, situational, and context-sensitive in a way that doesn’t lend itself to be written down clearly the way that episteme—explicit and explicitable knowledge—demands. “You had to be there.”

Like good craftsmen we spent a lot of time workshopping tweets

Chris can now reliably express his thoughts through the medium of bangers.

Finally, the essays. Those were the most fun for me. Because I’ve always written them in one hour or less I never spent any time editing. Here I was exclusively editing. This made me realize that, if I were to train writing as a skill, that’s where I should’ve started.
You should start from the end. Gain the skill to finish something that is 99% done, then 98% done, then 97% done, etc. Working your way backwards from the end.

his intuitions are the exact opposite of mine: he wants to be succinct to a fault, burning down all inferential bridges; I’m exhaustive to a fault, sprawling, obviously.

he’d often use this heuristic that I love and have since tried and failed to adopt: “The best sentence is no sentence.”

Contrasting how Chris does things and how I do them made for a stark difference: I famously try to do everything on my own, no matter how much others push me to collab; I don’t work on things over time, being all about volume and energy; and I do it all out in the open. Participating in a different way of doing knowledge work—collaboratively, through time, with precision, and private workshopping—taught me something about what is possible and what must be going on behind the public knowledge front-end.