I tend to brush hard
Unless a dentist has told you to do this for some reason, you should know this is not recommended. Brushing hard can hurt tooth enamel and cause gum recession (aka your gums shrink down, causes lots of problems).
And, at risk of quashing OP's admirable spirit, a more "robust" toothbrush would exacerbate the relevant harms
I think it is entirely in the spirit of wizardry that the failure comes from achieving your goal with unintended consequences.
Thanks for this post. Some thoughts:
- I really appreciate the basic vibe of this post. In particular, I think it's great to have a distinction between wizard power and king power, and to note that king power is often fake, and that lots of people are very tempted (including by insidious social pressure) to focus on gunning for king power without being sufficiently thoughtful about whether they're actually achieving what they wanted. And I think that for a lot of people, it's an underrated strategy to focus hard on wizard power (especially when you're young). E.g. I spent a lot of my twenties learning computer science and science, and I think this was quite helpful for me.
- A big theme of Redwood Research's work is the question "If you are in charge of deploying a powerful AI and you have limited resources (e.g. cash, manpower, acceptable service degradation) to mitigate misalignment risks, how should you spend your resources?". (E.g. see here.) This is in contrast to e.g. thinking about what safety measures are most in the Overton window, or which ones are easiest to explain. I think it's healthy to spend a lot of your time thinking about techniques that are objectively better, because
Glad you liked it!
I'm very skeptical that focusing on wizard power is universally the right strategy. For example, I think that it would be clearly bad for my effect on existential safety for me to redirect a bunch of my time towards learning about the things you described (making vaccines, using CAD software, etc)...
Fair as stated, but I do think you'd have more (positive) effect on existential safety if you focused more narrowly on wizard-power-esque approaches to the safety problem. In particular, outsourcing the bulk of alignment work (or a pivotal act, or...) to AI is a prototypical king-power strategy; it's just using (king power over AI) in place of (king power over humans). And that strategy has the usual king-power problems - in particular, there's a very high risk that one's supposed king-power over the AI ends up being fake. Plus it has new king-power problems from AIs not thinking like humans - e.g. AI probably won't be governed by dominance instincts to nearly the same degree as humans, so humans' instincts about e.g. how employer-employee relationships work in practice will not carry over at all.
More wizard-power-esque directions include ambitious interp and agent fou...
I think that if you wanted to contribute maximally to a cure for aging (and let's ignore the possibility that AI changes the situation), it would probably make sense for you to have a lot of general knowledge. But that's substantially because you're personally good at and very motivated by being generally knowledgeable, and you'd end up in a weird niche where little of your contribution comes from actually pushing any of the technical frontiers. Most of the credit for solving aging will probably go to people who either narrowly specialized in a particular domain; much of the rest will go to people who applied their general knowledge to improving the overall strategy or allocation of effort among people who are working on curing aging (while leaving most of the technical contributions to specialists)--this latter strategy crucially relies on management and coordination and not being fully in the weeds everywhere.
Perhaps a more useful prompt for you: suppose something indeed convinces the bulk of the population that AI existential risk is real in a way that's as convincing as the use of nuclear weapons at the end of World War II. Presumably the government steps in with measures sufficient to constitute a pivotal act. What are those measures? What happens, physically, when some rogue actor tries to build an AGI? What happens, physically, when some rogue actor tries to build an AGI 20 or 40 years in the future when alorithmic efficiency and Moore's law have lowered the requisite resources dramatically? How do those physical things happen? Who's involved, what specifically does each of the people involved do, and what ensures that they continue to actually do their job across several decades? What physical infrastructure do they need, where does that infrastructure come from, how much would it cost, what maintenance would it need? What's the annual budget and headcount for this project?
And then, once you've thought through that, ask: what's the minimum intervention required to make those same things physically happen when a rogue actor tries to build an AGI?
To be clear, I think we at Redwood (and people at spiritually similar places like the AI Futures Project) do think about this kind of question (though I'd quibble about the importance of some of the specific questions you mention here).
That resonates.
One of the main things fueling my agent-foundations research[1] is that, correctly interpreted, the activity is very much isomorphic to unraveling deep eldritch truths of reality, mastering them, and harnessing them towards the task of binding cosmic horrors. Complete with cautionary tales involving people going mad attempting it, apparently.
"Wizardry" is not quite the terminology I'm thinking in, but that is a quintessential wizard activity.
Wizard power… is far harder to obtain in great quantity, in our world
Yep. The general aesthetic you describe is, likewise, something that resonates with me. The image of constantly tinkering with independently conceived projects in a wide variety of domains, each of them harboring the ambition to push the frontier of what's possible; regularly consuming new domains as the whim strikes and promptly starting to mess with them as well? That is the dream, since childhood.
But this is something where I'm very much feeling bottlenecked on intelligence and stamina. Not enough cognitive-bandwidth-multiplied-by-time to actualize this. Especially with the end-of-the-world deadline looming and all.
And the failure mode there is, well... ...
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1One can certainly do dramatically better than the baseline here. But the realistic implementation probably still involves narrowing your wizardly expertise to a few domains, and spending most of your time tinkering with projects in them only. And, well, the state of the world being what it is, there's unfortunately a correct answer to the question regarding what those domains should be.
That's an issue I thought about directly, and I think there are some major loopholes. For example: mass production often incentivizes specializing real hard in producing one thing at the lowest possible price, at the cost of flexibility and generality. There are other production technologies which instead favor generality, like e.g. CNC and 3D printing, but at higher production cost. For someone aimed at personal wizard power, those technologies make much more sense to invest effort in learning.
Sure. And the ultimate example of this form of wizard power is specializing in the domain of increasing your personal wizard power, i. e., having deep intimate knowledge of how to independently and efficiently acquire competence in arbitrary domains (including pre-paradigmic, not-yet-codified domains).
Which, ironically, has a lot of overlap with the domain-cluster of cognitive science/learning theory/agent foundations/etc. (If you actually deeply understand those, you can transform abstract insights into heuristics for better research/learning, and vice versa, for a (fairly minor) feedback loop.)
As someone who spent the first two years out of college designing a full mouth electric toothbrush as the lead mechanical engineer, unfortunately making one in your garage is unlikely to go well. Bristling (or tufting as it's known in the industry) is pretty much only done at very high volumes - minimum order quantities don't go lower than 100,000 (or at least they didn't back in 2010/11). One of the reasons our toothbrush didn't make it to market was that there's no established method for prototyping small quantities of tufted products because at this point they're so commoditized. The one functional prototype we made was produced by harvesting bristle bundles from off the shelf toothbrushes and hand gluing them to the prototype using food-safe super glue. The next step was going to be dropping a couple million on custom tooling for a trial run of thousands of brushes 😭
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3I think it's a good direction to move in. But I usually don't think of it as "trying to become a wizard" or some kind of self-improvement. When I do something, it's because I'm interested in the thing. Like making a video game because I had an idea for it, or reading an economics textbook because I was curious about economic questions. The challenge is maintaining a steady flow of such projects, I've found that in "steady state" I do about one per year, which isn't a lot. So maybe ambition would actually help? Idk.
I think an important distinction is that wizards create and kings allocate; if you have a bunch of wizards, they can all wield their powers mostly without interfering with each other and their results can accumulate, whereas if you have a bunch of kings then (beyond some small baseline amount) they basically compete for followers and the total power being wielded doesn't increase.
On my model, the strongest individual people around are kings, but adding more kings doesn't typically make civilization stronger, because kings basically move power around instead of creating it. (Though kings can indirectly create power by e.g. building schools, and they can reveal hidden power by taking a power that was previously being squandered or fighting against itself and directing it to some useful end.)
I do think it's pretty unfortunate that the strategies that make civilization stronger are often not great strategies for maximizing personal power. I think a lot of civilizational ills can be traced back to this fact.
On my model, the strongest individual people around are kings, but adding more kings doesn't typically make civilization stronger
I don't think this is true, at least when generalizing "King" to "manager". One of the major ways societies develop is by getting better at coordination and resource management. Not every manager in e.g. Costco is a king, in the sense of having singular total authority, but they are all making decisions about the allocation of resources that are conveyed to those below them in the heirarchy, that adds together to a complex supply chain network that can achieve material prosperity that farmers alone couldn't manage.
There's a technical sense in which writing a piece of computer software consumes electricity and calories and so it's not "from nothing", but I think that that framing does more to obscure than to illuminate the difference that I'm pointing to.
If the total value of everything in the wizard's workshop is higher when they finish than it was when they started, then I think it makes sense to say that the wizard has created value, even if they needed some precursors to get the process started.
Seek wizard power, not king power.
What about wiseman power?
If a king is marching in front of the crowd where it pushes him, and the wizard gets busy with random things like inventing toothbrushes, who is going to tell them all what to do?
I mean the importance of the priority management. Spending much time for getting better toothbrush or pants doesn't look rational.
While I overall share the preference for Wizard power over King power for aesthetic and moral reasons, I don't think that Wizard power is a more effective way to gain real power than King power.
I think a King’s power is largely real: they can cause wars and collect taxes etc. And I think King power sums up to a much larger amount of real power in today's world than Wizard power. I think the consideration of whether you're fake-leading the parade only goes so far. Social leaders still have a substantially larger voices with which to steer the parade than everyone else. Especially in the age of AGI, leaders may no longer need to respect the values of most people because they're not economically relevant. You may worry about losing King power over a more Wizard-powerful AI, but unfortunately it's pretty intractable to outrace AI in gaining Wizard power without utilizing substantial King power.
Psychologizing a bit, I think the thing that people resonate with most about Wizard power is becoming intellectually formidable, epistemically rational, and capable—people here, including myself, have a lot of Carlsmith blue in them aesthetically, and tend to terminally value epistemic rationality.
Especially in the age of AGI, leaders may no longer need to respect the values of most people because they're not economically relevant.
Or militarily relevant. Traditionally, if you were a ruler, you had to at least keep your army happy. However, if you command an entirely automated army that doesn't have any actual people in it, there's no risk of the army turning against you. You have the robot weapons and nobody else does, so you can do whatever the hell you want to people without having to care what anyone else thinks.
It might be that I'm just unintentionally misconstruing your argument, but I think you're limiting "wizard power" to STEM fields, which is a mistake.
Napoleon was most definitely a "king" (or an emperor, if you want to be literal), but he was also very much directing the parade he was in front of. In a sense, he was a sociological engineer, having turned his country into a type of machine which he could direct towards securing his own vision of the world.
In contrast, consider "Dave". Dave has mastery over the various methods of creation you listed, he knows CAD, can program, etc. But he works for Apple, and is the team lead for creating the newest Iphone. What he creates is not up to him. Despite having wizard skills, Dave is more like a bureaucrat, high in "king power".
The STEM-type wizard is really good at solving very specific problems, like killing a disease or making crops grow better, but the Napoleon-type wizard probably operates more in the abstract, wrestling with bigger ideas, albeit with less direct control over them.
This is pointing in an interesting direction. In hindsight I wish I'd noticed your post on RadVac and written to you for help getting (or making) a dose, as I mainly didn't do it because the prospect felt overwhelming and you probably would have been happy to help. The sparsity of social fabric that led to this course of action not occurring to me seems important to repair.
The main reason I haven't been motivated to do much of the sort of thing you're describing is that it seems to me like there's an oversupply of people trying to do something impressively interesting and novel, relative to people doing (or controlling the surplus of) primary production, to be legitimately impressed and interested. I've tried various ways of occupying the latter position without losing my mind, and gradually downshifted to just trying to raise good children in a politically non-naive way without lying to them, supporting their agency as much as possible, and crippling their agency as little as society will let me get away with.
So I don't know if I'm a good candidate for a primary contributor to the sort of event you're describing. But the life circumstances you're describing seems like a central ca...
2A few points:
- All of these things sound obviously awesome and fun to do
- Cooking is imo another class of wizardry
- Have you tried the antidepressant bupropion? Ask David for the pitch
Because of 1, I think the difficulty you'll find building (or finding) this community is not whether or not what you're saying "resonates" with people, but whether they have the expertise, energy, or agency to put in their share of the work.
1Disclaimer: I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice. Do your own research.
In short: I experienced something similar. Garrett and I call it "Rat(ionalist) Depression." It manifested as similar to a loss/lessening of Will To Wizard Power as John uses the term here. Importantly: I wasn't "sad", or pessimistic about the future (AI risk aside,) or most other classical signs of depression; I was considered pretty well emotionally put-together by myself and my friends (throughout, and this has never stopped being true.) But at some point for reasons unclear to me, I became listless. The many projects of a similar flavor to things John points at above, which I used do to in spades, lost their visceral appeal (though they kept their cognitive/aesthetic/non-visceral appeal and so compelled me to force myself now and then to some success but also some discomfort and cognitive dissonance)-- and it happened gradually so that it seemed like a natural development over a year or two.
My girlfriend, who is on Bupropion for regular physician-recognized depression, encouraged me to try it just to see. So I did. And it worked.
And it kicks in very quickly. There was a honeymoon phase duri...
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1Took buproprion for years and while it did help with executive function, I was also half-insane that entire time (literal years from like 2015 to 2021). I guess it was hypomania? And to expand on 'half-insane' - one aspect of what I mean is was far too willing to accept ideas on a dime, and accepted background assumptions conspiracy theories made while only questioning their explicit claims. Misinformation feels like information! Overall there was a lack of sense of grounding to base conclusions on in the first place. I will note this still describes me somewhat, but not nearly as bad. Although it is a bit hard to pin down how much of that was a lack of tools and knowledge, a lot of it was an inability to calm down and rest. A brain constantly on the edge of exhaustion and constantly trying to push is in no state to think coherently.
Buproprion also made my anxiety significantly worse - I attribute most of the panic attacks in my life to it. But all this was very hard to notice due to college stress, and after taking it long enough I had just just attributed it to my base personality + existential despair from learning AI risk.
My overall positive experience from it was that it...
As a doctor, I can tell you that even if you don’t have anxiety, it’s possible to develop some while taking bupropion/welbutrin. I used it personally and experienced the most severe anxiety I’ve ever had. It is also associated with a higher chance of seizures, and if you daydream a lot, it may make them worse. However, on the positive side, it often decreases inattention. Generally i like the drug , but it is not a first-line treatment for depression, and for good reasons.
Interesting though about using it to improve one's performance rather than just as an antidepressant or aid to quit smoking.
IIUC the model here is that "Rat Depression" in fact is just depression (see downthread), so the idea is to use bupropion as just an antidepressant. The hypothesis is that basically-physiologically-ordinary depression displays differently in someone who e.g. already has the skills to notice when their emotions don't reflect reality, already has the reality-tracking meta-habits which generate CBT-like moves naturally, has relatively weak emotions in general or habitually decouples from their emotions, etc.
this post resonated with me more then anything else on this site, ever since i was a child my goal in life is to accumulate scientific knowledge and all the power that comes with it and build a lab where i can do what ever the hell i want, it is the very thing that got me into rationality to begin with and i think many people have gotten into rationality for the same reason.
i even manged to build a small workshop where i experimented with various chemicals and electronics and mechanical contraptions.
i also had a similar experience with burnout in university, i got into IT even though it wasn't my favorite subject because the job opportunities there (at that time at least) where much better the other faculties.
i haven't given up on my main goal, i just thought that if i can get a comfy job in software engineering i can then have all the money and free time to do what i want, basically i was trying to "suffer now and enjoy later" and went as far as to abandon my workshop.
it didn't go well, and suffered a burn out so bad i am still recovering form it now, i since moved into engineering and got some of my passion back.
i hope more posts like this are made on lesswrong, i think all the talk about X risk and AI i think many lesswrongers have burned out and lost their passion.
I like the terminology. I have the opposite conclusion though, at least if "king power" means the power to convince others to do things. There's a property to a world that determines whether wizard or king power is stronger and it's something like the variance or skew of ability*. In worlds where one person can accomplish, on their own, as much physical change as hundreds or thousands of others, wizard power is superior to king power. A powerful wizard with their magic will do more than a king with his army. In worlds where there is low variance in ability, king power is superior.
Many magical or anime worlds have high ability variance and training gains are linear or exponential instead of logarithmic or some other plateau function. Our world appears to have low variance in ability. For all the Chuck Norris memes, there is really no one who stands a chance against an army. In unarmed combat, I'd guess that we cap out around 10x, even the best fighter in the world couldn't fight more than 10 average men simultaneously. Other fields may have different ratios, but in general it seems easier to convince/pay a team of smart people to do X than to do it yourself.
If I could take Eliezer's or Nick Bostrom's belief about the importance of AI safety/alignment and transfer it to Trump, I would.
*technically the ratio of this and a convinceability factor, but most fictional worlds don't tend to alter convinceability.
Of course, wizards in the modern world depend on the structures that king power built, and not having those structures makes wizards way, way less useful than in the modern era.
More generally, the power to manipulate social reality is a hugely powerful ability, even if there are real constraints, and I generally think king power is less fake than you do (though relative to wizard power, king power makes it easier to produce ideas/tasks/materials/goods that don't work, due to the lack of obvious verification and worse feedback loops, due to the adversarial context).
In particular, it can bring you the technological progress necessary to solve problems, even if it's not a direct cause.
Management, delegation and social skills are very, very valuable and not fake.
In relation to AGI, I basically agree with Alex Mallen's comment here that king power is going to matter a lot if you want wizard power (except in very, very fast takeoff scenarios):
I do think king/social power has a habit to be more fictional/constrained than wizard power, because it's harder to verify in social settings, often deliberately so, but I'd contest the claim that king power is universally/widely fictional, especially in practice.
Interesting. While the post resonates with me, I feel like I am trying to go in the opposite direction right now, trying to avoid getting nerd sniped by all the various fields I could be getting into, and instead strategically choosing the skills so that they are the most useful for solving the bottlenecks for my other goals that are not "learning cool technical things".
Which is interesting, because so far based on your posts you struck me as the kind of person I am trying to be more like in this regard, being more strategic about my goals. So maybe the pe...
You may like one of my posts: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vLrj4ZNcGCTMJqdXB/intelligence-as-privilege-escalation
so you want to be powerful among wizards, huh? I suppose you can go join one of the wizard clubs and start acquiring underlings
You aren’t looking for professional. That takes systems and time, and frankly, king power. Hackers/Makers are about doing despite not going that route, with a philosophy of learning from failure. Now you may be interested in subjects that are more rare in the community, but your interests will inspire others.
I’m a software engineer by trade. I kind of think of myself as an artificer: taking a boring bit of silicone and enchanting it with special abilities. I always tell people the best way to become a wizard like me is to make shitty software. Make something you know, something small, and that sounds like fun. It’ll be terrible and barely functional, but it’ll be yours, and the next one will be a little less shitty. Keep at that, until you can start thinking at higher levels of abstraction. eventually, your work will be less and less shitty, and before you know it it’ll be good.
Hackers/Makers encourage amateur work, because that’s where most people are, because they’re just starting out. Make no mistake, there are professionals in the community, but no one expects you to be up to their standards. Instead, they’ll help you make things a little less shitty.
Make it. Then make it work. Then make it right.
Failure is your teacher.
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1I like this but from a standpoint of geek thematic pedantry, I think a more appropriate trope is ‘Artificer Power’.
I do realize the third syllable cuts into the usability a bunch. But, c’mon, wizards are not about welding or sewing.
I think the thing I'm trying to point to is importantly wizard power and not artificer power; it just happens to be an empirical fact about today's world that artifice is the most-developed branch of wizardry.
For example:
- Doctors (insofar as they're competent) have lots of wizard power which is importantly not artificer power. Same with lawyers. And pilots. And special ops soldiers. And athletes (though their wizard powers tend to be even more narrow in scope).
- Beyond lawyers, the post mentions a few other forms of social/bureaucratic wizardry, which are importantly wizard power and not artificer power.
- Try finding chat logs or recordings of you talking to people where this part of you expressed itself with strong emotional resonance, if you have them, and setting aside an afternoon meditating on the experience of re-absorbing the logs. Personal communication can be even more powerful as a mental save-state than broadcast writing, though reading both seems valuable.
- Talk to Rob Miles. I think he has a pretty similar structure in some ways, especially the wanting to build neat physical things. I bet you two would have fun with this.
- One more thing I'll share by DM at some point in the next couple weeks.
Curated. The distinction in kinds of power feels reel. I feel like I highlight the "power of having resources" (e.g. money) which is perhaps part of king-power (though John doesn't list that) or another kind of power.
I wonder if an effect is that living in a large well-developed economy of (i) cheap ready-made goods, and/or (ii) goods that are better due to specialized expertise, equipment, etc., there's a push against doing things yourself. Even with skills and tools, buying Ikea furniture might still be a better time/money trade-off for most. The b...
I noticed my toothbrush. I tend to brush hard, so I go through toothbrushes quickly; the bristles were all splayed out rather than straight. Wizard power would be making my own toothbrush, out of something which wouldn’t wear out so easily.
They do make various different firmnesses of toothbrush.
In general, there are large economies of scale from mass production. Society needs to be seriously screwing something up before making it yourself is a viable option for a lot of things. You can make your own toothbrush as a hobby, but it will probably be...
Ok, your post made me think of two things.
First, in French, we have two words that can be translated as "power": "pouvoir" and "puissance." An author I like, Alain Damasio, stressed that we should seek "puissance" - the intrinsic ability to act by ourselves (like the power of a turbine), rather than "pouvoir" - which always relies on others (like the power of a king). The king is nothing without subjects.
Second, this distinction reminds me of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" by Friedrich Nietzsche :
"Flee, my friend, into your solitude! I see you deafened with the ...
Thanks, it's an inspirtional pitch, I can relate.
And my observation from this kind of communities (hackerspace, engieering/hacking conference), is that a large fraction (I think majority?) of participants are much more interested in the tech itself rather than in applcations. There is also not that much drive for novelty and innovation.
I think that there should be space for exploration and learning, but to me, wizardry is about getting things done, solving actual practical problems.
For example, at hackaday.com, there are cool projects, but a large fraction of the (extremely talented) hackers are building yet another 8bit computer.
1This resonated with me a lot. The wizard vs king power thing really clicked for something I've been feeling a lot lately. (And apparently I'm not the only one, your post had 320 upvotes when I wrote this comment lol)
I got into programming when I was a kid because I liked creating things, and it took me a long time to realize that generalized to physical creation too (I've only been getting into maker stuff for like a year). Vibeclipse (the TPOT event) kind of sparked the transition for me, but I think it just leveled up my agency, and the desire-to-create ...
This is a neat and inspirational post! Minor nitpick:
The social incentive gradient will almost always push one toward king-power
I don't think this is true. Being a wizard, especially if you're the only wizard of that kind in your social group, can give you a lot of respect and admiration. I don't personally feel like there are lots of social incentives pushing me in the king direction, but I do feel like there are lots of them pushing me in a wizard direction.
As one particularly notable example, I'm the chairperson of one hobby association which is a somew...
I feel like this is optimizing for the general factor of wizard powers, but if you actually want:
And if one wants a cure for aging, or weekend trips to the moon, or tiny genetically-engineered dragons… then the bottleneck is wizard power, not king power.
... Then to obtain a cure for aging you'd be better off finding patients (I guess pets have a good chance of being medically analogous to humans while not facing too many regulatory hurdles), performing root cause analysis of what's causing their age, and then trying to cure that. And that would gradually e...
I read this pretty soon after you posted it and have been thinking about it a lot about it in snatches ever since. I think it's pointing at something important. Here's a few things adjacent to it, or important components of it, or something like that. I think you will find them useful, @johnswentworth .
- A belief in a Tomorrow which is worth living in, such that set-up actions are worth taking that wouldn't otherwise be worth at all.
- A belief that you can, in fact, just do things - do new things, do things that play off of old things, do things for yourself t
1Feels more Alchemist than Wizard.
Definite strong overlap (the so-called 'Wizard Book' literally depicts an alchemist). I think a Wizard has a lot more 'grand real world directedness' than the projects you're pointing to here - though they may also have a bunch of gumption and subcreative genius for solving local issues (like toothbrushes and trousers).
FWIW I think you also carry the abovementioned Wizard characteristics.
Of note, alchemists routinely lose contact with social realities, blow themselves up, or go crazy from too much mercury exposure. Somethin...
How much benefit do you get for the CAD skills over having the money to hire someone else who has the CAD skills and a lot of experience with using them?
The framing of science and engineering as isomorphic to wizard power immediately reminds me of the anime Dr. Stone, if you haven't watched it I think you may enjoy it, at least as a piece of media making the same type of point you are making.
Funny you should post this; I don't remember how, but I came across the curriculum for 6.943 at MIT a few weeks ago.
I experimented with specular holograms (generalized scratch holograms) at my work CNC, grinded some engraving tools with diamond sandpaper, but I kept snapping tips because my table wasn't flat enough and I was using black acrylic instead of polished aluminum.
I was slightly obsessed with trying a DIY biomimetic hand a few months ago, looks like you can do McKibben muscles with variable braid angle mesh sleeves (like how a bicep balloons in th...
FYI (cc @Gram_Stone) the 2023 course website has (poor quality edit:nevermind I was accessing them wrong) video lectures.
Edit 2: For future (or present) folks, I've also downloaded local mp4s of the slideshow versions of the videos here, and can share privately with those who dm, in case you want them too or the site goes down.
1(DunCon was more in this direction than LessOnline, downstream of me feeling similarly, and DunConII will be substantially further, and also it's not like "wait until then" is the thing I'm saying, but like. Hi.)
1I have a somewhat similar feeling of having become less ambitious and agentic over time. Part of the issue is that a lot of the cool weird stuff I tried when I was younger didn't really work out, so the expected value is low. And my current life status makes me more risk averse.
Or to use your analogy, if the last 10 times the wizard has tried something clever, 9 times the result was some useless green goop, and 1 time a smoking crater where your castle used to be. Then its entirely rational to reallocate funds away from the wizard towards hiring more...
Thanks for the reminder that wizardry takes dedication to the learning and practice of the craft, even if that is not exactly what it says.
Wizard power would be a great session at LessOnline. I would attend!
This week I've been working with a few folks at Lighthaven, applying wizard power to make some social gizmos that should make for an interesting addition.
When you build something for a community like that I think you get something more than the sum of its parts. It's not a fusion device, but I think the concept fits well.
Along with pants and a water based air conditioner, might I suggest an industrial dishwasher? Those puppies can do a load every 30 seconds.
I love the article. You would make a good farmer. We don't have regulations out here in rural Iowa. You can do all your own plumbing and electrical work, and nobody will complain that it looks like a spider's web of wires in your basement. There are also plenty of broken down vehicles to fix, always more than you feel like fixing. Your clothes would break down quickly, so you would need hardier pants. There are no rules...
1The most powerful wizard I've met recently was a guy at the University of Cape Town who could just seemingly build almost anything. He worked on a crazy machine that was used to simulate the crystalline structure of metals for industrial processes at different stages to ensure it could meet spec.
He has a side business creating these world class knives through an autoCAD system using incredibly high quality steel https://www.maxwellvosdesigns.com/.
His next project was to a create a 100x cheaper than standard electron microscope to see if it could be spun ou...
1One benefit of wizard power over king power is king power often involves fighting/competing with someone else for power, it’s zero-sum, while building wizard power involves fighting the world & is positive sum.
Fight the world before you fight others.
Creation Over Conflict.
Evokes thought of the turnip economy, gold economy, and wish economy...
Essentially, wizards are indeed weak in that the number of worthwhile spells a wizard can cast is measured in spells per decade. Want to use alteration magic to craft a better toothbrush? How many months are you willing to work on it... with that much effort, the economies of scale strongly suggest you should not make one, but a plan... a spell formula that others can cast many times to replicate the item.
It is nice to seek general knowledge, but the skill to actually make use of that k...
1For the pants, start with a pair that wash how you want them to, then take them to a tailor to adjust the shape to be correct. Then you have pants to wear while you spend months and hundreds on the skills and tools that it takes to compare with garment-factory quality on the hard parts like sewing through 4-6 layers of strong fabric.
Making pants nicely from scratch is a losing proposition on all axes except bragging rights, compared to adjusting an off-the-rack pair to fit as desired.
Speaking of the "king's power" as a power that only redistributes: what about emergent systems? It seems that we have kings who organize society in the same way that wizards organize matter.
I play the role of the king's lawyer, but there is a difference between a group of wizards organized into a conclave by the king's power bearer and the two of them separately. Therefore, we must attribute the increase in their power to the one who moderated the process... If we consider the criterion of "creating an increase in value", which works in this case, bu...
This resonated a lot with me, but I had a different mental model of this kind of power, which I think may interest you: 'Real' Power vs 'Make Believe' Power.
The 'Kings' power you described relies heavily on a social group collectively believing in your power. If every subject of a King stopped believing in Monarchy at the same time, you would lose your power immediately. If the whole of America were to stop believing in student loan debt, banks would lose a lot of money. And if people stopped believing the the trading value of paper bills, money would lose...
This is the first post I’ve ever commented on— it’s weirdly relevant to my life right now. I’m in manufacturing workforce development. We’re looking at building training centers for CNC, casting, forging, vacuums, 3D printing, etc.. I love the way you’ve framed this and can relate. From bits to atoms. You should check out the reindustrialize community on X.
1Deviate more than a little from the route, and the parade will cease to follow you
Also true when starting a company as an indistinguishable founder. At first, especially in a rapidly evolving space, your central focus is responding to what the market wants and building it before someone else does. It's only after achieving dominance that you can invest effort into building things no one else would.
in the real world wizard power is so much weaker than in fantasy.
While I agree with the spirit of this, there are some ways in which I don't think it is correct. Ways that have some interesting implications.
When reading fantasy novels we usually experience the story from the perspective of one of the main characters. A character who's wizard power is typically orders of magnitude above that of the average sentient being in the story. If you instead experienced the story from the perspective of an average person in your given fantasy universe the pote...
I stumbled across this exact concept from a different angle. My vision of wizardry came from a desire to be able to do significant and unpredictable things. Inspired by this, I put together a list of 200 hundred topics I'm vaguely interested in. I invite others to read the first dozen or so items on my list, then sit down for 30-60 minutes and create your own lists. Think up some of the many ways in which a bit of knowledge can help you better predict the world or a bit of skill can help you better influence it.
1I think the difference between the two types of power, seems to be Intrinsic (Wizard) vs Extrinsic (King). The two are interrelated in that having one can confer the other if one wishes, but for the mortal human, the best path forward (i.e. the path I like the most and believe should be the path to the most combined W+K power for the highest proportion of people) seems to be seeking deep levels of wizard power and pursuing it in all areas.
Side proposal: I occasionally get bursts of ingenuity, ideas and a desire to make them happen at night, like two ...
my dream dwelling was a warehouse filled with whatever equipment one could possibly need to make things and run experiments in a dozen different domains
I had a similar dream, though I mostly thought about it from the context of "building cool fun mechanical stuff" and working on cars/welding bike frames. I think the actual usefulness might be a bit overrated, but still would be fun to have.
I do have a 3D printer though, and a welder (though I don't have anywhere to use it - needs high voltage plug). Again though not sure how useful these things are -...
The skills you will accumulate over the years are analogous to the way the wizard's spellbook works in dnd.
There's a lot you can do, but the the perishable skills need practice, and that practice comes at a cost. So you have a giant library of various books, and when you want to do something you haven't done in a while, you need to spend some time getting everything prepped. Sometimes a piece of capital equipment with high maintenance costs is needed, sometimes there are expensive tools needed.
The alternative might be to hyperspecialize in one ...
the bottleneck is wizard power, not king power.
King power is zero-sum. We cannot both be kings of one another, at least not in the same domain.
Wizard power is positive sum and in some sense your wizard power can enhance mine. If you write a post about creating a batch of RadVac, the odds that I will learn how to do the same increase. The best way to become a good engineer is to spend time with great engineers.
Of course, this assumes that we can avoid obsessions with being comparatively better than others and instead focus on becoming absolutely better. Hard to do for most people.
Always try reversing and rephrasing things to see if they still make sense: "I want a toothbrush that's more durable than my teeth" sounds kind of silly.
For months, I had the feeling: something is wrong. Some core part of myself had gone missing.
I had words and ideas cached, which pointed back to the missing part.
There was the story of Benjamin Jesty, a dairy farmer who vaccinated his family against smallpox in 1774 - 20 years before the vaccination technique was popularized, and the same year King Louis XV of France died of the disease.
There was another old post which declared “I don’t care that much about giant yachts. I want a cure for aging. I want weekend trips to the moon. I want flying cars and an indestructible body and tiny genetically-engineered dragons.”.
There was a cached instinct to look at certain kinds of social incentive gradient, toward managing more people or growing an organization or playing social-political games, and say “no, it’s a trap”. To go… in a different direction, orthogonal to that one. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on the name of that orthogonal direction.
There was that time I made a batch of RadVac. What happened to that guy? Where’s the part of me which did that sort of thing?
In Search of a Name
I needed a Name. Not necessarily a full mathematical True Name, but a sufficiently robust summary of what I’d lost that I could rebuild it and stabilize it so it wouldn’t go missing again.
It had something to do with power. I knew Names for some kinds of power, even full-blown proper True Names for two types, dominance and bargaining power, but those were the wrong types. Those were Names for two kinds of power which kings wield. I needed to point away from that, toward some other kind of power. If not kings, what archetype would wield the kind of power I needed to point toward?
Wizards.
That was it. There is the power of kings, and then there is the power of wizards.
The social incentive gradient will almost always push one toward king-power. But it’s mostly fake, mostly a trap. Like a bank which only actually holds a fraction of your deposit, but without all the other depositors and insurers which make banks actually work. Most king power is… marching in front of the parade, acting like you’re leading it, when really the parade has a route of its own. Deviate more than a little from the route, and the parade will cease to follow you. Ask for things which aren’t already on the market, and no one will know how to get them for you, nor will you know what you need to do to get people to produce them.
Wizard power… is far harder to obtain in great quantity, in our world. Part of the fantasy appeal of wizards is just how much they can do how easily, when in the real world wizard power is so much weaker than in fantasy. It’s being able to weld or sew, knowing how to use CAD tools and 3D printers and CNC machines, working with electronic circuits or writing code, building a house or installing plumbing or wiring, genetically editing bacteria. Even in social domains - e.g. deep knowledge of bureaucratic structure or case law conveys social wizard power, circling and pickup artistry and non-violent communication each convey their own form of social wizard power. Real world wizards do not beat armies. But at least wizard power isn’t fake. It isn’t always fungible across tasks, which means the wizard powers one has aren’t always right for the problem at hand. But at least wizard power is always 100% real; it’s never fake in the way that so much king power is fake.
And crucially… most people just don’t optimize that hard for increasing their wizard power. The social incentive gradient is toward king power. So even if the wizardry of fantasy is out of reach, one can do far better than baseline. One can grow so much stronger in wizard power.
And if one wants a cure for aging, or weekend trips to the moon, or tiny genetically-engineered dragons… then the bottleneck is wizard power, not king power.
That resonated.
Seek wizard power, not king power.
It wasn’t all of what I’d lost, but it was enough to begin to rebuild and stabilize.
Near Mode
What happened to the guy that made a batch of RadVac?
That guy didn’t just abstractly want wizard power. To that guy, wizard power was immediate, real, near mode, it was as immediate as going out to the store to get milk.
I noticed my toothbrush. I tend to brush hard, so I go through toothbrushes quickly; the bristles were all splayed out rather than straight. Wizard power would be making my own toothbrush, out of something which wouldn’t wear out so easily.
I held on to that thought, for a few days. Some time back in college, I’d decided not to build CAD skills; it seemed like too much of a time sink. That was a mistake, wasn’t it? If I wanted to make a nice toothbrush, the main thing I’d need was basic CAD skills, a bit of money for a one-off injection molding job, some research to figure out more robust bristle materials, plus a little elbow grease to assemble it all.
Then I remembered: for years, my dream dwelling was a warehouse filled with whatever equipment one could possibly need to make things and run experiments in a dozen different domains. From a wetlab to a shop, injection molding machine to atomic force microscope, vacuum equipment and cleanroom, maybe even a lightweight chip fab. I hadn’t even thought of that dream in… two years? Four? About as long as that core part of myself had been slowly going missing.
That was the right direction to move toward, on the margin.
What else do I want besides a more robust toothbrush, which markets don’t seem to provide very readily? A nice tailored pair of pants which won’t fall apart or look like trash if I throw them in the washing machine; tailors always use delicate materials and assume you’ll dry-clean it. A water-cooled air conditioner; they’re flatly superior and a common choice for industrial-strength air conditioners, but for some reason cheap consumer versions aren’t available. Decoration for my apartment which is cheap, but not so boringly bland as most everything today.
So now I’m working on those things, in my spare time. The pants are up first.
I saw the announcement for LessOnline. Last year it was okay, but it didn't really excite me. What would excite me? I wish for the sort of weekend conference where there might be a session in which people make their own pair of pants, and another in which people CAD up and then 3D print some simple object, and another in which we walk through how to use the sound equipment for the event, and another in which we build a nice-looking fake tree, and then another in which we walk through how to use a gene gun or a mass spec or a desktop sequencer or …. A session on making a website or training a neural net would be good too, but they shouldn’t be 95% of the event, because in this social circle it’s been done to death already. A day-or-two-long session in which we build a simple fusion device, covering all the basics of vacuum and high-voltage equipment along the way, would be perfect. Or a shorter session in which participants disassemble and then reassemble a small combustion engine. Social wizardry events would be great too - a “read the entire US government manual” event would be great, or a “cram session for the bar exam except none of us have ever been to law school at all”, or “read the annual reports of the 100 companies which account for the majority of physical capital assets in the US”, or even just a session in which we go through the entirety of the day’s Federal Register release.
… that’s where I’m at, right now. It would be cool if that felt right to other people too. I feel like I’d be more whole, or more the-shape-I-want-to-be, with a community centered and grounded more around building wizard power.
Forget RadVac. I wish for the sort of community which could produce its own COVID vaccine in March 2020, and have a 100-person challenge trial done by the end of April.