Orienting Toward Wizard Power
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.
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
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 it is less tied up in social realities. That attitude reminds me of your post.
I share your desire to know about all those things you talk about. One of my friends has huge amounts of “wizard power”, and I find this extremely charming/impressive/attractive. I would personally enjoy the LessWrong community more if the people here knew more of this stuff.
I’m very skeptical that focusing on wizard power is universally the right strategy; I’m even more skeptical that learning the random stuff you list in this post is typically a good strategy for people. 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), because those topics aren’t as relevant to the main strategies that I’m interested in for mitigating existential risk.
You write “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.” I think this is true in a collective sense—these problems require technological advancement—but it is absurd to say that the best way to improve the probability of getting to those things is to try to personally learn all of the scientific fields relevant to making those advancements happen. At the very least, surely there should be specialization! And beyond that, I think the biggest threat to eventual weekend trips to the moon is probably AI risk; on my beliefs, we should dedicate way more effort to mitigating AI risk than to tiny-dragon-R&D. Some people should try to have very general knowledge of these things, but IMO the main usecase for having such broad knowledge is helping with the prioritization between them, not contributing to any particular one of them!
Glad you liked it!
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 foundations, but also less obvious things like “make a pivotal act happen without using an AI” (which is a very valuable thing to think through at least as an exercise), or “be bureauracy wizard and make some actually-effective regulations happen”, or whole brain emulation, or genetically engineering smarter humans.
It’s not central to this post, but… I’ve read up on aging research a fair bit, and I do actually think that the best way to improve the probability of a cure for aging at this point is to personally learn all of the scientific fields relevant to making it happen. I would say the same (though somewhat lower confidence) about weekend trips to the moon and tiny genetically-engineered dragons.
Most pivotal acts I can easily think of that can be accomplished without magic ASI help amount to “massively hurt human civilization so that it won’t be able to build large data centers for a long time to come.” I don’t know if that’s a failure of imagination, though. (An alternative might be some kind of way to demonstrate 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 was for making people consider nuclear war an existential risk, so the world gets at least as paranoid about AI as it is about things like genetic engineering of human germlines. I don’t actually know how to do that, though.)
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).
Some sort of “coordination takeoff” seems not-impossible to me: set up some sort of platform that’s simultaneously massively profitable/addictive/viral and optimizes for e. g. approximating the ground truth.
Prediction markets were supposed to be that, and some sufficiently clever wrapper on them might yet get there.
Twitter’s community notes are another case study, where good, sufficiently cynical incentive design leads to unsupervised selection of truth-ish statements.
This post has been sitting in my head for years. If scaled up, it might produce a sort of white-box “superpersuasion engine” that could then be tuned for raising the sanity waterline.
Intuitively, I think it’s possible there’s some sort of idea from this reference class that would take off explosively if properly implemented, and then fix our civilization. But I haven’t gone beyond idle thinking regarding it.
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.
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.
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… LARPing as a wizard. Delving into fields while only half-understanding them, starting a bunch of abortive, predictably useless toy projects that are obviously not going to go anywhere, such that an actual expert in the corresponding domain would’ve seen that at a glance; reinventing bicycles-but-worse. The whole thing just being a feel-good waste of your time. At best a dabbler, rather than a sorcerer.
One 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.
(Or maybe I’m being needlessly pessimistic cheems-mindset about this and I need to snap out of it.)
“Fueling” as in “giving me the motivation to keep doing it even when it’s not innately rewarding”, rather than “actual sober reasons I’m doing it”. The former is a subset of the latter.
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.)
I 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.
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.
Wisdom is about making a good decision about whether or not to make your own toothbrush or buy them from the store. Wisdom is about making good decisions about whether or not to inject RadVac.
The skills of actually accomplishing those tasks seem quite different. It’s possible to have Wizard power but not the wisdom to use it properly and mess up a lot.
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 😭
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 case of the sort of thing I’d be willing to move and/or spend some money to make available to my family; highly aligned with my vision here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xNf9ZkjXLkFYPDscs/levels-of-republicanism
I don’t know how to move this forward but I’ll try to reveal some information related to potential opportunities for collaboration:
Automation of high-value massage
Basic physical science education for a toddler
Some things I can do
Automation of high-value massage
Recently a friend wrote to me asking for advice[1] about how to use a massage gun effectively. Valentin Rozlomii ( visceralcure.com ) is the one I learned this from—I decided to try his services out when Michael Vassar told me he uses an infrared camera to find areas of the body that have poor circulation to the muscles (they’re cold). One piece of advice I gave was that the muscles running along the spine are especially high leverage to work on, since if they’re chronically tight they can impinge on major nerves innervating large sections of the body, so they can be responsible for a lot of referred pain. This is hard to get at with a massage gun for obvious anatomical reasons, but Valentin is working on a solution. Last I checked he’s designing parts with a 3D printer but could use a mechanically inclined collaborator to get the whole thing working, so if you’re interested I’d be happy to connect you.
Basic physical science education for a toddler
My 2 1⁄2 year old son Danny has various toy trains he plays with, including a couple Thomas the Tank Engine style trains. His Thomas is a Brio-style train you can push along a wooden track, but his Percy has an electric motor he can switch on and off that drives the wheels. When I found him touching Percy’s wheels to Thomas’s to drive Thomas’s wheels with the power of Percy’s motor, I decided he was ready to absorb information about gears and other simple machines.
The iPad “educational games on machines we could find seemed actively bad, and the main apparent transfer learning effect was that he started hitting his little brother.
One thing we tried was watching the David MacAulay cartoon series The Way Things Work, on YouTube. He hated it a few months prior when I offered it to him, but now he appreciates it some. We started with the episode on gears. When we got to an episode on flight, he was interested enough—and mentioned that he wanted to fly—that I looked up which kites were recommended on Metafilter and Reddit, and ended up buying an Into the Wind Kids’ Delta kite, which we flew on the next convenient windy day. I’m glad I bothered to find a nice one, as it flew noticeably more easily than the ones I remember from my childhood (which kind of put me off kites).
I bought a toy gear set from a local toy shop with bolts to attach them to a board, and drill bits you can put on either a fixed handle or a toy power drill to drive the bolts or the gears. He’s getting proficient with that.
Another thing I did was order a bunch of educational kits through Walmart.com. He enjoyed helping me put together an LED-powered windmill (he handed me the screws) and was excited to go out and see the wind turn the blades fast enough to power the light. He likes playing with the pulley set we ordered, but it’s flimsy, and I’d like to buy or build him a better one. Other kits I have queued up:
Water purification kit
Electric motor circuit kit
Battery-powered fan circuit kit
Fruit battery powered light circuit kit
Magic Schoolbus 10-activity mechanics kit we found at Barnes and Noble for $10 - haven’t looked carefully at it yet.
Danny’s also interested in the idea of rockets and I’d love to give him some safe practical experience with very simple rocketry principles, so I wrote to a localish rocketry group asking if anyone would be interested in showing him what they know.
All this is an inferior substitute to having friends doing interesting physical work that they are happy to explain and demonstrate to their very young new friend. Our live-in landlord is happy to let Danny watch and when safe and convenient participate in the home improvements he does. In another year or so Danny might be ready to learn some basic carpentry from the father of a childhood friend of mine if he’s willing to teach. Designing and bulding his own kite might actually be a good craft project for him after he’s able to draw simple shapes like rectangles freeform.
Some things I can do
I’ve invested a fair amount of time into cooking. I often optimize on time-quality tradeoffs but frequently throw things together from why’s laying around that impresses people. When I lived in Harlem there was a Paulownia tree with branches touching our balcony. I looked it up and found the flowers were edible, so I made cheese omelettes with Paulownia flowers for houseguests. Eventually I set up a drip agriculture garden on the balcony to grow herbs, which are relatively high value per square inch of space. We didn’t have an outdoor tap, so I bought a rain bucket to feed the drip system, and filled it up with a hose running from the kitchen sink about once a week.
I also have some accumulated knowledge on simple nutritional health hacks that seem to frequently get good results when people bother to try them (e.g. for anxiety, try magnesium BEFORE trying benzos, the side effect profile is much milder and MANY people are deficient in magnesium).
I’m not an expert at Tai Chi but I can teach a few things about balance; this causes people to think I’m a lot stronger than I am because with clear consciousness of balance (center of mass etc) it’s much easier to pick up heavy objects and move them around without much strain. Looking into Feldenkrais and other paradigms has given me an implied catalog of cheap-to-try mind-body heuristics that some friends report legit helping them, which I only bring up in conversation when I have reason to think they’d be actually useful (e.g. a friend reported hip problems that made me suggest wearing an eyepatch sometimes, which seemed to help with identifying and fixing lateral asymmetries).
Here’s my whole response to the friend in case anyone could use the info.
A few principles & heuristics:
If you are already readily conscious of the sensation in a muscle, and know how to move it through its full range of motion under normal loads, then the only reason to massage it is to transiently relax it in order to access muscles under it. Blank spots, ticklish spots, extremely tender muscles, or very weak or chronically shortened muscles are good candidates for massage.
Pay attention to which muscles are partial or total antagonists. If you have conscious trouble with one muscle, check for its antagonist or other muscles in the cluster to see whether one of those is a better candidate for focus.
Start with fast vibrations to superficially relax, work up to slower deep penetration.
If you start feeling warmth or itching that’s a good sign that you’re oxygenating tissue that needed it. Ideally go deeper once the warmth/itching fades. I don’t have a strong sense of whether it’s good or bad to push through some muscle pain in the process; Valentin seemed to think it was fine as long as it’s not so painful that you involuntarily brace or something. But plausibly it would be more effective in the long run to be more patient. FAFO I guess.
The muscles running along the spine just to each side are particularly high-leverage since it’s common for them to be weak and tight, and they impinge on major nerves that innervate much of the body. You won’t be able to reach them well at some spinal latitudes holding a massage gun yourself—Valentin is developing a machine to help with that—but a partner or a lacrosse ball can help. Twisting around the point in various ways once you’ve got some pressure on it can help too.
Looking up images or videos of e.g. the deep shoulder muscles (rotator cuff, pectoralis minor, serratus, etc), the deep hip/abdominal muscles (e.g. iliacus and psoas) was helpful for me.
A 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.
🫡 I have pitched him. (Also agreed strongly on point 1. And tentatively agree on your point about the primary bottleneck.)
I’m curious about this pitch :)
Disclaimer: 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 during the first ~8 days it takes for all of the long half-lived active metabolites to reach equilibrium concentrations, during which I and others I know have reported feeling mild euphoria along with the other benefits. After that subsides, it’s a background thing where mostly you look back on your day/week and realize you just got things done and did more things. And it’s been consistently helpful ever since. (4-6 months for me, ~7 years for my girlfriend, years for some family members and somewhat less time so far for others I know personally.)
Oh and my social battery is way larger. I used to get introvert-exhaustion in a way that ~basically doesn’t happen anymore. Parties are more often fun than not, now.
Further nice-to-haves:
It’s not an SSRI, it’s an NDRI, so it doesn’t do the terrible SSRI things. Side effects may include decreased mental fog, increased libido, decreased appetite, and a renewed will to Wizard Power.
You’ll “feel it” right away (~same day) even though it takes a ~week to settle in to equilibrium concentrations (and, anecdotally from others, possibly up to month to feel it’s final form?)
It’s fairly easy to get. Go to your psychiatrist and ask for it (XR, extended release to be taken in the morning) or trade time/convenience for money and go online to a site like Nurx.com and if, upon completing their intake survey, they consider you to have mild depression (not severe or you’ll scare them off) they’ll start mailing you bupropion once a month!
It doesn’t work for literally everyone. If you have bad anxiety, or if you have mania, be warned. But for the large handful of people around me who are now on it, they’ve reported fast and significant positive effects, including at least one other “Rat Depression” case.
That’s most of the pitch.
I also had a pretty similar experience.
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.
The wikipedia side-effect page says that the rate of seizures is between 0.01-0.1%, for comparison about 0.68% of the population has epilepsy, so I’m skeptical this ought to be such a concern. Am I reading these numbers incorrectly?
I can definitely believe the anxiety bit. It is a stimulant, and anxiety & depression are very very correlated.
People with a history of seizures are usually excluded from these kinds of clinical trials, so it is not an apple to apple comparison. the problem is that bupropion interacts with a lot of drugs. seizure rates are also highly dose dependent(10 times higher if taking more than 450 mg daily). Generally, if you’re not taking any interacting medications, are on the 150–300 mg slow-release version, and have no history of seizures, then the risk is low.
Yeah, I figured something like that would be going on if I was wrong, thanks!
Do you have an indications that those without the clinical signs of depression (or at least doctor approved state) won’t become acclimated to the drug in a way those that perhaps need it for a balanced state don’t?
I suppose asking a bit differently here, what are the gears here that do the work and how well one might think they they match up with one’s own system that is in place?
Interesting though about using it to improve one’s performance rather than just as an antidepressant or aid to quit smoking. the wiki has some good info but interesting that it doesn’t have a strong effect on dopamine so makes me wonder if looking more at what norepinephrine does, or perhaps the ratio between norepinephrine and dopamine.
Any consideration on the use of other NDRI drugs rather than Bupropion. I’ve not looked into much at this point but Bupropion does have some side effects I would not be too interested in experiencing.
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.
I don’t think there’s only one type of depression. Major head trauma does lead to depression in a good portion of people.
It’s my impression Bupropion seems to make it easier to break out of patterns that bind your behavior. That’s true whether that’s smoking (which is why Bupropion is used to help people to stop smoking) or some patterns that contribute to depression.
Bupropion seems to treat akrasia, which is a major part of a lot of “Rat depression”.
I assume the idea is that bupropion is good at giving you the natural drive to do the kind of projects he describes?
I would say it’s more about getting rid of “things” that stop the natural drive than giving that natural drive in the first place.
If you don’t have any natural drive to do these kinds of projects, Buproprion might not give it to you but if your natural drive is blocked Bupropion might be more helpful.
Not really, the hypothesis is that John has depression, and of all the antidepressants, bupropion is the best (if it works for you).
Well but also kind of yes? Like agreed with what you said, but also the hypothesis is that there’s a certain kind of depression-manifestation which is somewhat atypical and that we’ve seen bupropion work magic on.
*And that this sounds a lot like that manifestation. So it might be particularly good at giving John in particular (and me, and others) the Wizard spirit back.
This is true, but I read amitlevy49′s comment as having an implicit “and therefore anyone who wants that kind of natural drive should take bupropion”. I probably should’ve given more information in my response.
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.
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.
Noah Smith elaborates.
When the king is aligned with the kingdom, how would you distinguish the causal path that the king projected their power and their values onto the kingdom (that previously had different values or was a tabula rasa) and not that the kingdom had selected from a pool of potential kings?
After all, regicide was not that uncommon (both literally in the past and figuratively speaking when a mother company can dismiss a decision of a board of directors over who should be the CEO)...
(I’m not saying anything about Wizard power being more or less effective)
I think the King has real power whether or not they were elected/selected, in the same way that you have free will whether or not your actions can be predicted.
But if the King has to worry about regicide then that reduces the King’s power, because now the King has fewer options.
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.
Interesting distinction to draw out. I some what come away with a view that wizards get to play in the positive-sum game world while kings are stuck in a zero- to negative-sum game. I’m not completely sure that is a good modeling though might see the game of thrones hitting it’s equilibrium at a lower number of kings than one might expect to occur with wizards (resources are not infinite so at some point wizards will also just be competing against one another for stuff—and possible followers for their own parades).
So maybe the bit is that we will tend to find ourselves in a world where kings are at, or past, the equilibrium level, but the market for wizards will still support expansion and growth. I suspect there is likely some interaction here such that as wizards “create” and more wizards then create more, this activity produces some scope for increasing the kingdoms.
So perhaps it’s not really about king power or wizard power but identifying where the greatest lack resided.
I’m not sure that is the whole story here though as some of John’s post seemed to point at purely personal aspect—where that lost part went and why. I’m not sure that the king/wizard framing gets to the core of that.
Maybe, but I don’t feel like it’s a coincidence that we find ourselves in such a world.
Consider that the key limited resource for kings is population (for followers), but increasing population will also tend to increase the number of people who try to be kings. Additionally, technology tends to increase the number of followers that one king could plausibly control, and so reduces the number of kings we need.
Contrariwise, increasing population and technology both tend to increase the number of available wizard specializations, the maximum amount a given wizard can plausibly learn within any given specialty, and the production efficiency of most resources that could plausibly be a bottleneck for wizardry.
(Though I feel I should also confess that I’m reasoning this out as I go; I hadn’t thought in those terms before I made the root comment.)
Perhaps it is more terminology as I didn’t mean to suggest some existing tendency was merely coincidental. I suspect, and would agree with the points you make, that some underlying structures will produce that fewer king opportunities and more wizard opportunities world.
I see a lot of complications in the interactions here related to the kings and wizards framing that can muddy things up. But was really just observing that these are not quiet as simple as choose wizard power over king power. I think one finds more wizard opportunities (to be found within all parades, between parades and even before/after/separate from parades), but think that sometimes we’ll have new parades that want to do their thing but existing kings are able to see that path so a new king (not really competing with other kings as the parade will not follow them far) will add a lot of value. That then opens up more wizard opportunities. Plus, I suspect many wizards would be poor kings and many kings poor wizards—so think about who you are when looking for you “power”.
Choosing the wrong option or choosing one at the wrong time will be low/negative value (probably both personally and systemically). But if you’re unsure about it, choosing wizard is probably the smarter choice.
I think it would be more accurate to say that wizards transmute. “Creation” actually requires resources, so it’s not creation from nothing.
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.
Software is kind of an exceptional case because computers are made to be incredibly easy to update. So the cost of installing software can be neglected relative to the cost of making the software.
Wizard power well-directed can do amazing things.
Most wizards (1)do not develop particularly strong powers, (2) the powers they develop are often pretty useless at society level, and (3) on their own usually don’t use those powers very efficiently, and (4) most (?) wizards do not naturally work well together without direction.
King power is pretty similar, but :
you naturally get higher levels of power than in wizards, but you can only have so many people with so much king-power (based on number of people and available resources);
(2) does not apply much (once you get past a certain level of power being a bully to your own family is pretty irrelevant) directionally, but as with (3) there is a subset of skills for actually being a good manager/executive which are less incentivized
(3) is exacerbated, as the way to gain more power is often different from being effecient, especially for society
(4) is mitigated, except when working together well is sub-optimal for gaining power
One of the major issues for humanity in building something like this is king-power players developing and using the wizardry of getting things done, organizational rot and weakness are a massive issue in society
Such events do exist—you can come to a Fabric camp.
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.
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
Yeah, hackerspaces are an obvious place to look for wizard power, but something about them feels off. Like, they’re trying to be amateur spaces rather than practicing full professional-grade work.
And no, I do not want underlings, whether wizard underlings or otherwise! That’s exactly what the point isn’t.
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.
I think this is importantly wrong.
Taking software engineering as an example: there are lots of hobbyists out there who have done tons of small programming projects for years, and write absolutely trash code and aren’t getting any better, because they’re not trying to learn to produce professional-quality code (or good UI, or performant code). Someone who’s done one summer internship with an actual software dev team will produce much higher quality software. Someone who’s worked a little on a quality open-source project will also produce much higher quality software.
In practice, that seems-to-me to generalize to most areas of engineering and craftsmanship. Plenty of hobbyists go screw around with things, and they just want to screw around with things; they don’t care about polishing their outputs, so they never develop half the skills a professional is forced to develop. And often, it’s not that much more time or effort or money to develop the extra skills! It’s a matter of making the right kind of effort, moreso than a matter of time or investment.
There are hobbyists who’s programming ability is lower than that of the average professional programmer. There are however also people who have historically called themselves hackers who’s skill at programming exceeds that of the average professional programmer. One example that was remerable to me was the guy who was giving a talk at the Chaos Computer Congress about how we was on vacation in Taiwan and because he had nothing better to do he cracked their electronic payment system that the Taiwanese considered secure before he went on his vacation.
At a good Hackerspace you do have a culture that cares about craftmanship and polishing skills.
Amateur spaces are the most cost-effective way of raising the general factor of wizardry. Professional-grade work is constrained on a lot of narrower things.
Yeah, the underling part was a joke :D
The problem is that most hackerspaces are not this:
”warehouse filled with whatever equipment one could possibly need to make things and run experiments in a dozen different domains”
most hackerspaces that I’ve seen are fairly cramped spaces full of junk hardware. which is understandable: rent is very high and new equipment is very expensive.
but would be cool to have access to something like:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=530540257789037
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 cheaper and easier to just buy more toothbrushes. Or, run hot water over the bristles, squeeze them back into shape, then run cold water over them. Or just keep chewing on a flat looking toothbrush.
(Also, you want your toothbrush to be less wear resistant than your teeth, as your toothbrush is easier to replace)
Wizard-power is pretty weak when you are just making something for yourself. It only really shines with economies of scale. Some of that economy of scale is in owning the tools. Some is in understanding the particular details of the domain.
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.
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 noise of the great men, and stung all over with the stings of the little ones.
Forest and rock know how to be silent with you. Be like the tree which you love, the broad-branched one—silently and attentively it overhangs the sea.
Where solitude ends, there begins the market-place; and where the market-place begins, there begins also the noise of the great actors, and the buzzing of the poison-flies.
In the world even the best things are worthless without those who make a side-show of them: these showmen, the people call great men.
Little do the people understand what is great—that is to say, the creator. But they have a taste for all showmen and actors of great things.
Around the creators of new values revolves the world: -- invisibly it revolves. But around the actors revolve the people and the glory: such is the course of things.”
Your king is clearly the showman, and I think that the wizard can be the creator of new values if he decides to share his discoveries with the rest of the world. And around the creators of new values revolves the world. For The parallel with Nietzsche and your post holds if we slightly extend the definition of ‘new values,’ but why not?
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 pendulum swings back, and eventually you find out that letting yourself get nerd sniped by random things does have some hidden benefits? I guess I will find out in a few years (if we are alive).
I do think one needs to be strategic in choosing which wizard powers to acquire! Unlike king power, wizard powers aren’t automatically very fungible/flexible, so it’s all the more important to pick carefully.
I do think there are more-general/flexible forms of wizard power, and it makes a lot of sense to specialize in those. For instance, CAD skills and knowing how to design for various production technologies (like e.g. CNC vs injection molding vs 3D printing) seems more flexibly-valuable than knowing how to operate an injection molding device oneself.
What’s your favorite times you’ve used CAD/CNC or 3D printing? Or what’s your most likely place to make use of it?
I feel like this is optimizing for the general factor of wizard powers, but if you actually want:
… 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 expand your knowledge of how to cure aging in more and more cases. And to obtain weekend trips to the moon, idk I guess you’d want some solar → rocket fuel conversion plant + something to mass produce heat shielding + reusable rockets? I don’t know what you need for tiny genetically engineered dragons and I kind of suspect it’s a difficulty level above the others.
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?
In my experience (beginner/intermediate CAD skills), this depends on how clearly you are able to explain the exact part you want.
If you only want parts which are easy to clearly describe, you can hire someone to CAD them up… or you could describe them to an LLM and have it emit files that you can convert to your CAD of choice.
If you want something less well-specified, or you want to “think out loud” and continually adjust your part’s design as you bring it into existence, the friction of having someone else running the software becomes prohibitive.
A similar question would be, how much benefit do you get from being able to type over having the money to hire someone who has typing skills and a lot of experience? Maybe you’d be fine with giving up that control over what words go onto the page, or maybe you’re using typing skills for something like driving a game or a text editor at a finer-grained level of control than would otherwise be available. Same with CAD.
Perhaps a more general way to approach the question would be can one identify the existing comparative advantages related to the wizard power related task to be performed.
Don’t know if this is still the case but 15 years ago something very similar existed with CAD/CAM production. The CAD design could be passed through a processor to generate the G-code (instructions the CAM processor reads and follows) and then some machinist would review and “fix” tool path or order to make the code more efficient for production.
A key aspect of typing is that it allows other skills to be expressed. If I want a given software written, I need both my typing and my programming skills. Employing someone who has no typing skills to do the programming for me is a bad idea. On the other hand, if I employ some with programming skills equal or better to mine it works. For the quality of the end product, the programming skills are a lot more important than the typing skills.
Do you have an idea about what kind of skills your CAD skills allow you to express that a random person you hire with CAD skills might not possess?
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 the middle to increase contraction length for the same amount of energy expenditure) and medical grade silicone tubing, fishing wire for tendons, PLA for 3d printed anatomically accurate bones, liquid latex or shrink wrap for synovial capsules and mineral oil or Vaseline for synovial fluid, catheter syringes for hydraulic pressure for the muscles at first, but then off the shelf microfluidic devices with maybe an Arduino controller, then possibly RPNI with machine learning to make it a fully functional prosthetic. The professional tech seems so close now though it’s a little discouraging.
Wow I’m surprised I’ve never heard of that class, sounds awesome! Thank you.
FYI (cc @Gram_Stone) the 2023 course website has (
poor qualityedit: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.
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.
I think a lot of the participants are bottlenecked on a lack of important problems that they dare attempt to solve.
For 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.
This 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 was already there.
I’m still very low level with making stuff, the sorts of things I make are like, laser-cut lamps or a deck of custom metal tarot cards, or a wooden plaque for scanning the house’s wifi password. Pretty trinkets, nothing like vaccines or biotech research!
But even so, there’s something about it that feels right in a way that’s hard to explain. A focus on the end result, a dedication to improving skills. The way you described the toothbrush, wanting something that you couldn’t simply buy—that’s a very familiar feeling underlying all my maker projects. When I create something it’s completely unique.
You could also 3d print it and then seal it, in which case you could get by without true CAD and use something simpler like Blender or Plasticity.
This is a neat and inspirational post! Minor nitpick:
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 somewhat king-like position, but I largely have the position due to it being one that nobody really wants and I myself would be happy to abdicate it to anyone who did want it. But everybody just wants to either chill or focus on wizarding, and we only have a chairperson because we need a legal entity for our finances and the law says that the legal entity has to have a chairperson so somebody has to do it.
Relevant siderea quote, that rings very true in my experience:
I don’t particularly expect to be blamed for things, but it sure would be a lot easier to drop the chairperson position and I know that people would be fine with me doing that. People have told me that they appreciate me doing the role so I do get some reward for it, but mostly it’s just my sense of duty keeping me there and the social incentive would be for me to find something easier.
Feels 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. Something to bear in mind.
Some more observations: when Alchemists accidentally stumble on something Kings want, Kings usually come and take it. Sensible Kings employ Wizards for counsel, not Alchemists (but they keep Alchemists under watch and maybe try to point them at stuff). In a common-knowledge confrontation between a King and a Wizard, the King usually wins. The Alchemist has no chance against either, they just have to hope and assume they haven’t offended anyone too much.
King power is pretty real actually, it just isn’t held entirely by the King. The King is a coordinator, a director, and a leviathan, which accrues much more coherence to the subjects than without. Potent. Not always (though often) to the benefit of the King.
I 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 or three times a year. I will now be calling them Wizarding Hours. If anyone has suggestions on how to make these moments of inspiration and seemingly endless idea generation happen more often, please share.
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—it seems to me like it is mostly for fun, and in the end the novelty wears off a bit once I realize that building something actually useful will take way more time than I want to spend on non-AI safety work.
But maybe that is something I shouldn’t have given up on that quickly, perhaps it is a bit of “magic” that makes life fun and maybe even a few actually cool inventions could come from this kind of tinkering. And maybe that would also permeate into how I approach my AI safety work.
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.
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 specifically topic that you’re sure nobody else cares much about, and develop a large social network of people who similarly specialize. If you have a task that requires specialist knowledge of two disciplines, it’s hard for me to tell if you win by having two specialists who learn to work together, or having two generalists who cross train in both, but not as deeply.
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):
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Wg6ptgi2DupFuAnXG/orienting-toward-wizard-power#A3zuXoEiXYjET5ggr
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.