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.
- Monthly Roundup #32: July 2025 by (21 Jul 2025 12:00 UTC; 41 points)
- Origin Story by (5 Jul 2025 1:16 UTC; 9 points)
- 's comment on How To Dress To Improve Your Epistemics by (18 Sep 2025 6:08 UTC; 5 points)
- ACX Montreal meetup—July 5th @1PM by (2 Jul 2025 2:43 UTC; 5 points)
- 's comment on Better Air Purifiers by (11 May 2025 20:53 UTC; 3 points)
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.
Yeah I think this is a perfect example of how reality squashes wizards. The number of relevant details in a problem isn’t constrained to what a single person can handle. Forseeing second and third order consequences can range from very hard to impossible, and they can have arbitrarily large effects on the outcome of a project. With all that said, the activities OP described sound awesome and I am 100% on board to become a wizard.
This is why orienting around the concept of teleology makes sense, right? Where the end goal is what you optimize for. That accounts for all n-order effects, even the unknownable ones (your method either works or it does not. If it “should” work but does not work in practice, you abandon it)
Teleology seems to be making a comeback (saw a recent Sabine Hossenfelder video on it). Funnily enough I stumbled on a decade old yudowsky essay dismissing it but I think all the objections are answerable now. Basically: the future does determine the present if you consider correct predictions of the future as knowledge in the same way knowledge of something happening physically far away from you is knowledge. You can make decisions in the present based on your ability to correctly predict the future.
Yeah, johnswentworth should consider an electric toothbrush with a pressure sensor. There are multiple models available for <$50.
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.
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.
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.
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 😭
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.
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.
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.
Gut instinct is that the number of kings needed to maximally coordinate a number of wizards is somewhere around logarithmic.
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
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.
This maps to king power to me.
I think this is its own thing. Skilled wizards can nerdsnipe on toothbrushes and irrelevant math problems. Skilled kings can get distracted by random political slights or not understand economics
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.
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 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.
The post inspired a similar thought in me as well. There’s a reason that people in any complex field have a wariness of anyone coming in thinking that they’ve discovered a new way to do everything better from first principles. And modern culture tends to valorize disruptors and innovators more than people who grind away slowly on incremental improvements to complex systems.
Though I do feel like there are a lot of people out there who don’t consider knowledge based solutions to their problems as much as they should, so maybe its a reverse all advice you hear situation.
As a father of an almost-two-years-old who is infinitely curious, I would benefit greatly from a write-up of what you found works and doesn’t. I also don’t live in the West and visit only occasionally so it is costly to buy things to try out; I’d appreciate learning from your experience!
Haven’t found the time to do a general writeup for years 2+ but here’s my writeup from child 1 year 1: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/happy-birthday-to-my-firstborn-baby-boy-a-memoir/
wait can you explain the hip problems/eyepatch thing?
Friend reported that they were considering barefoot shoes but their PT said their arches were too high and they were pigeon-toed.
Me
Friend
Me
Friend
Me
Friend
Me
Friend
Me
Friend
Me
Friend
Me
Friend
Me
Friend
Me
Friend
Me
Friend
Me
Friend
Me
Friend
Me
Friend
Me
Friend
Me
Friend
Me
Then, about 2 months later:
Friend
Me
Friend
Me
Friend
Me
Friend
Me
Friend
2 more months go by
Friend
Me
I really don’t like how this post blends supernatural, fictional elements with the practical. The caveats about how wizard power in reality isn’t like wizard power in stories are good, but not sufficient, the actively misleading term continues to warp people’s cognition.
For example, it wasn’t mentioned how technology (I’m not going to call it wizard power) generally requires a lot of coordination and capital (“king power”) to get working, and produce at reasonable price. Magic is sexy and cool because you’re “doing it yourself” whereas technology is a large team effort.
John seems to be warped by this effect ^ notice how he talks about DIY ~entirely in terms of doing stuff alone instead of in large groups, because that’s sexier if you’re an individualist & distrust all large groups. You would not come up with “making your own toothbrush” as something that’s “wizard power” without these cognitive distortions (individualism + magical thinking).
But really my main problem with this isn’t that it lacks some caveats, it’s the general pattern of Rats actively distancing themselves from reality, often in a way with undercurrents of “our thoughts here are special and our community is the best”. I know this isn’t enough to point out the feeling I get for those who don’t share it. It’s hard to see when you’re in the community, but after leaving looking back the distortions are extremely obvious. I might write more about this at some point, or maybe not.
I like this sentiment:
I wish there was more action and clear thinking in the rat community, without weird cognitive distortions that are hard to see except from outside.
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.
Took 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 felt like a stronger caffeine.
What ultimately helped depression (not cured but way improved) was
* transitioning to female (estrogen in particular has strong positive effects for me within hours, but only when taken via the buccal or sublingual route instead of orally)
* stopping buproprion—was frankly not good for my brain for multiple reasons (some listed here)
* adderall to treat my (unknown to me until ~2022) ADHD
* graduating college and then not having constant stress from college or work deadlines
* learning to genuinely rest and enjoy doing nothing (stopping buproprion helped a lot with this).
* not constantly trying to come up with ideas and write expansions of them (this behavior mostly stopped when buproprion stopped as well, actually)
* eating better (beef in particular is extremely important for some unknown reason)
* doing physical therapy to fix upper and lower cross syndrome (took a long time to identify) - sleep is better, less constant muscle tension while laying down
* working less than 20 hours a week. (More than that isn’t sustainable for me)
* letting my activity be primarily driven by projects shaped like dopamine trails that spawn further dopamine trails instead of todo lists and dependency trees. Where I define 95% of what needs to happen in the moment as a reaction to the shiny thing in front of me—just one more interesting idea to implement this one tiny thing. Contrasted to the next awful task being handed down from various bigger todo lists.
* 4 days totally off for every ~8 of work (2 days off is never restful and I have multi-day momentum where I don’t want to stop working on projects)
* immense sense of calm safety while cuddling girlfriend (decreases my anxiety an absurd degree)
Also dropping the autistic masking. I didn’t think I did any of this since I’d known I was autistic since gradeschool, and thought I’d actively fought anything shaped like ‘being normal’. The kind of masking was people pleasing—I hadn’t even realized I was doing it so hard. It was completely and utterly out of control. I would simulate conversation trees to notice what things I might say that would induce stress in people, and then explicitly avoid saying those things later. I was unable to intentionally choose to induce stress in another person, and as it turns out that is a massive liability in fact. Because it means anything shaped like being slightly mean on purpose in your personality gets implicitly erased. Which is in fact traumatizing. Or any needs you have that require causing someone a bit of stress just don’t get met. It requires an unending quantity of input energy to accomplish, more and more as you get better at noticing what induces stress and contorting to avoid it. Never intentionally doing harm is completely untenable. It is an utterly unrealistic standard to hold oneself to. One has to intentionally induce some number of harms one is aware of causing beforehand.
But in doing so there’s suddenly room to breathe and live.
I’m very glad you’re in a better place now! It sounds like there was a lot going on for you and agree that, in circumstances like yours, bupropion is probably not the right starting point.
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!
Could you elaborate on the daydreaming? I think it might have gotten worse for me, although it was already pretty bad. I was hoping Bupropion would reduce it but if it has the opposite effect it might have been a bad idea to start taking it...
I also had a pretty similar experience.
Reporting back in after having laid hands on some bupropion. I’m two days in and:
it’s definitely doing anything helpful with respect to my senses of opportunity, pointfulness, allowedness/permission, and task initiation/switching/completion, among other subtle senses
it meshes just fine with my focus meds so far
the increase in anxiety has been real but thus far manageable
but also there’s some weird effect where it’s making me way more forgetful/absent-minded by way of that massively improved power at task-initiation and task-switching and sharpness of task-completion? I’ve already nearly mislaid things like pens, a pocket knife, my phone, assorted drinks.… and such because I set it down, finished a task, and then moved on to the next task
weak improvement to hedonic tone mostly flavored like ~internal burning/dynamoness? in a good way
More to come, maybe.
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”.
Bupoprion is used to help people stop smoking because it is in the same class of molecule as nicotine and triggers many of the same receptors. I wouldn’t expect it to help any other addiction as well as it treats smoking.
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.
Such events do exist—you can come to a Fabric camp.
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):
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.
Enjoyed this post! I resonate, and have dreamed of living in a gadget filled workshop too :)
> 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.
I was part of the team which designed a shelf-stable omicron vaccine and set a record speed for founding → first-in-human clinical trial.
If this is the kind of thing you’re talking about, I think you might be underemphasizing IMO the single most important vibe. Magic happens when brilliant people work together. We can get better and more powerful at working together. We can make returns to collaboration increasingly better-than-additive in domains like vaccines or toothbrushes or in general. IIRC nobody on our team had ever run a first-in-human clinical trial before.
I notice that many of your examples implicitly involve working together (e.g. “session in which people CAD-up”) and you shared this in a format where people think together.
When I think of a Wizard, they are typically alone?
On the one hand, yeah, that’s the dream.
On the other hand, focusing on people and groups and working together seems to be the #1 way that people lose track of wizard power in practice, and end up not having any. It’s just so much easier to say to oneself “well, this seems hard, but maybe I can get other people in a group to do it”, and to do that every time something nontrivial comes up, and for most people in the group to do it every time something comes up, until most of what the group actually does is play hot potato while constructing a narrative about how valuable it is for all these people to be working together.
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?
Same here. I think it’s because working on myself made me neglect my connection to everyday life. Working too much on yourself, in your own way, makes you a little bit incompatible with everything and everyone else. Wizard power (as I see it: A powerful mentality, independence, the ability to go ahead of everyone else) is best developed in isolation or smaller groups, but social connections are important for success in life.
The feeling which caused me to switch was that of a pyramid being upside down. If you work on top of the needs hierarchy while neglecting the bottom like I did, you’re putting yourself at risk, and this creates anxiety which is justified and thus hard to shake off again.
In my way of looking at this, Einstein had a bit of wizard power, and he had trouble getting recognized for it once he made his discoveries. Most people did not have much reason to believe that he was a genius, as he didn’t have a lot of social proof. Tesla also leaned too much towards his intellectual pursuits, I think. He didn’t have much in terms of money and friends, and this seemed to cause him difficulties even though he was such a competent person.
An alternative route I’ve thought of is becoming a social wizard. Those people who have an unnatural amount of charisma and the ability to read people like books.
About being nerd sniped—I think many things do bring some benefits. The problem is, even though you can do anything, you can not do everything. There simply isn’t enough time. I like this quote, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci: “As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself.”
A thing which I can’t put into words well but only warn about vaguely is the consequence of learning many new things too fast. When I do this, I face the same thing as OP does—I basically become another person. If I want to get back, I have to reverse my mindset, attitude, values, cognitive models, priorities, etc. and not just remember what I learned before, so for me, learning isn’t purely additive unless the new material is close to what I learned before. Even switching from “work mode” to “socializing mode” takes me a few hours at least.
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.
Oh man, of people I’ve interviewed, the college graduates are next to useless. There are exceptions, but that’s true of those that have less traditional backgrounds too. There are way more talentless hacks than skilled professionals. Even at the graduate level.
If they’re there because of a paycheck, you can keep them. I want the people on my team that do it because they love it, and they have since they were a kid. They’re the ones that keep up, and improve the fastest—I am certainly biased.
With the new generative AI assistants, we’re going to have way more who are new and dabbling. Hopefully more of them are inspired to go deeper. But you know what, even shitty software that’s e solves a task can be useful.
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
I 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.
mm. I feel some kind of dissatisfied with the naming situation but it’s (probably?) not actually important. I agree wizard feels righter-in-those-cases but wronger in some other ones.
Although, I think I’m now tracking a bit more subtlety here than I was before.
A distinction here is “ability to turn knowledge into stuff-happening-in-the-world”, and “ability to cause stuff happening in the world.” Does a very strong or dextrous person have more X-power than a weaker/clumsier person, all else equal? (I think your answer is “yes”, but for purposes of the-lacking-in-your-soul there’s an aesthetic that routes more through knowledge?)
I think that’s a straightforward yes, for purposes of the thing the post was trying to point to. Strength/dexterity, like most wizard powers, are fairly narrow and special-purpose; I’m personally most interested in more flexible/general wizard powers. But for me, I don’t think it’s a-priori about turning knowledge into stuff-happening-in-the-world; it just turns out that knowledge is usually instrumental.
“Maker Power”?
Fabricate suggests otherwise. What if you just feel like maxing out mundane economicmagic of which Prestidigitation is the example par excellence?
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 barrier to making your better own pain medication than Tylenol is quite high. And so we somewhat correctly get used to exchanging money for things, so we pursue power via having more money in a very abstract way. We also limit ourselves to options being sold to us.
This post then is a reminder that reality can be manipulated directly. Not via commanding or paying others, but via understanding and mastery of reality. Good message. Kudos.
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.
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?
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.
You might be more interested in Porcfest than LessOnline: https://substack.com/home/post/p-167363791
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.
I think there’s also a strong preference towards Wizard over King power (at least in this cultural space) because being seen as actively seeking power over others is considered threatening. Saying you want to tell people what to do because you think you know better than them how to get things done is going to make people defensive and wary.
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.
I love this post, and I have been thinking a lot about it since it came out.
One counter argument I can think of is the following.
The wizard capability of a single human is actually not very high
Human wizardry achieves greatest power when many wizards join forces and coordinate at scale
Hence, the most powerful people are those who can coordinate and direct large groups of wizards, in the language of this article, “kings”
So one may argue that it’s rational to seek king-power on this basis
Despite this, I personally resonate very strongly with the image of the wizard, and I think the world would be a better place if we all sought to strengthen our wizarding powers.
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 that other people don’t care enough about to go do themselves.
“This thing did not exist, and I needed it to. No one else was going to make it do, so I did it myself (or maybe got someone else to help or follow my plans).”
I think this is where people are coming from when they recommend makerspaces. I, too, recommend makerspaces, but also see later on about the League of Nondark Evil
“What happened to that guy? Where’s the part of me which did that sort of thing?”
Is this about personal augmentation and power? About maniacal scientific self-experimentation? About planning and enacting? Which of those feels right? (Or some secret fourth thing.)
All of these have different overlapping sets of things-to-try.
A desire to be part of a community, some kind of League of Evil-but-not-Dark, of other people taking unilateral actions that they think best, and somehow still getting along with each other and spurring each other on, to grander Evil Schemes
Evil here should be best understood in the sense of “self-centered, unilateral, directed towards empowerment (with others’ potential suffering treated as an externality/side-effect/out-of-scope rather than a desideratum, which would instead be Dark).
Something about depression and mental health, and having the link between desire and fulfillment have atrophied or been cut
I think this is where people are coming from when they recommend buproprion. I can’t recommend it out of a lack of experience but asking a psych about it is on the top of that particular to-do sublist’s stack.
More expressively and precisely, less neatly: Having your brain’s predictive-engine+mental-effort-budgeter be negatively-biased regarding the predicted outcomes of plans and thus clamp down on your precious supply of Gumption, and being horrified and sad about that, and wanting to do something about that, and being trapped by that very same piss-trickle of Gumption you’re now limited to.
A desire for personal empowerment/enrichment/?command?; a syntonia related to resourcefulness and curiosity and clean planning/execution/development loops?
Anyway: I like the vibe. It’s something that I feel pretty strongly and to some extent I think it’s what a lot of my hobbies are pointed at pursuing, in a variety of ways. Wizard Power seems like an important spiritual vitamin, and both one that it can be hard and finnicky to get and also not one it seems like everyone really needs. I need it, and it sounds like you need it.
I endorse cooking being one of a handful of workable sources of standout-seeming magic wizard power in this way. I think it’s worthwhile to try and I am happy to help you and maybe other people who I know and who ask me to, to do some interesting/fun cooking projects. At some points in my life, getting to play around experimenting with foods has been my main source of that felt sense of soul-nourishment, or at least a pica-replacement for it. Cloning recipes is one option; for a cantrip, if you don’t already tinker with technically-prepared food (canned soups, say, or ramen), you can start. I could talk about cooking projects I’ve done in the past, if that helped?
I also really like the idea of “let’s do a thing-you-can-in-fact-just-do and become more capable/powerful/knowledgeable, in a fairly fun and lighthearted way, rather than just while away this period of time in dissipated enjoyment”. If you end up seriously doing something of this type during the Lighthaven Festival Season or something, I will very likely participate seriously. Sewing would be a good one—I don’t really know how and I value tailoring and the fabric arts all the more for it; loved ones like @WhatsTrueKittycat and both grandmothers have won my heart with the Wizard Power of their enduring fiber arts and ongoing repairs thereto. I’ll keep an eye out for if you end up doing that.
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.
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.
This captures another angle on the question of whether one should learn a skill or outsource it: if the same person fixes the tool path and designs the component that needs the path fixes, that knowledge will inform their design choices on future parts. If there’s 2 ways you could draw a part and have it work how you need, then having the skills to fix the tool path and the knowledge to spot that one option would have worse path problems than the other will help you differentiate between the actual costs of the superficially interchangeable higher-level design options.
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?
Mostly the benefit to me of doing the full stack of a project—design/cad/build, sketch/draft pattern/ sew garment—come from learning something new about the situation partway through the process, and being able to immediately re-open prior “closed” decisions from earlier in the process to take full advantage of what I realized partway through.
When I do a 3D printing project, my first test prints tell me a bunch of details about exactly how my particular printer handles this one particular part, and it’s low effort to assimilate those observations into changing how I design or orient or support it for future attempts. Or I can revisit the entire plan of printing a part and fabricate it in a different way instead. In sewing projects, my pattern design and mockups and the fabric I’ve picked all inform one another, and when I learn that the fabric would do particularly well or poorly for a given detail, I can immediately revisit the top-level plan and change the details to work better with the material.
This effect is more pronounced when I’m doing projects farther from my established skill set. I rarely get the benefits I’m talking about on projects where I’ve done it a bunch of times already and know exactly what will happen. Once I know exactly how something will go, it’s easy to outsource the process—“here, do this exact task on these exact things and it’ll definitely work”. But more often, I’m not yet at that level of expertise and familiarity, so I’m learning new things in the course of a project, and it’s beneficial to be able to apply the new insights wherever they’re most impactful. The friction of outsourcing a component, waiting on someone else to do it, etc opposes my process of applying newfound knowledge to the project’s entire top-level description.
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.
This post is both inspiring and is resonating with me. Especially that when I created my username I was independently thinking of what a wizard is in similar terms.
I used to craft things and enjoy it a lot. Moving away from home for attending University (which is still not finished) and constantly moving made building stuff very hard and I basically stopped it.
Initially after reading this post I thought that I’d like to again heavily invest my time and effort into wizard power, especially in terms of building physical things that I can wear or use at home, but on the second thought I am still limited by those things that made me stop crafting in the first place. That said, I am determined to at least partially and gradually start using and developing those skills again. Overall I strongly support a vision of wizarding society that you described, and I would love to participate in it.
On a more general note, as mentioned by Dweomite, it’s not that king power is fake, it’s that it’s a very different kind of it. I don’t think that in my personal career it’s useless to pursue it. But depending on what exactly I end up doing, the utility in heavily investing into the wizard power will change.
For example, if one ends up in a political career or gets a management position in a company, then king power is the focus, but having basic wizard power gives greater understanding how to allocate resources most efficiently so as to increase the number of wizards and their output. But if one is in technical position, then knowing that you should aim mostly for more wizard power is a practical conclusion.
Ultimately, what kind of power to prioritize depends on a personal case. But I agree, at large society focuses on king power a bit too much and shift to wizard power would probably be more beneficial, and I tend to think that kings need to have at least some wizard power to be great at their pursuits.
Engineer here. Wizard power is abundant, but due to its non-scalable nature (improvements on the time-cost to produce wizard results are all within a single order of magnitude) & non-public-facing nature (king-power is intrinsically other-forward), it’s very concealed. The defense industry holds tremendous wizard power.
Regarding education, I think a lot of wizards have been trapped in what I believe to be a dead-end of software. Why do I think this is a dead end? It lacks the rigor needed to find truth & the physical substance to affect the material world. All software can do is concentrate king (or god, more on that later) power. This is without reference to the impact of AI on coding skills’ relevance.
We used to have a lot more wizard training in high school. I think we’d be able to afford a lot more.
But wizard power is costly to use (stuff costs money) & costly to train (machine tools etc need a place to live at best & expensive maintainance contracts at worst). So we find why software is seductive. It’s basically free.
~
Meta: Interestingly, this post made me think more about the nature of ``king power″. First blush take: there’s two things:
``King Power″, which fundamentally has something to do with decisionmaking & assuming the responsibilities associated with it. It’s the power to command, granted to the King by others because they trust that he will bear the cost of failure. (Note: when this is subverted, eg corporate misconduct, people get very upset)
``God Power″, which is self-referential, egregoric, and exists because people believe in its existence. Democracy has god power, not king power. But the god power of democracy grants king power to its executives. Those executives then go & lure wizards into their service.
But there does seem to be a difference between god power & king power. Boards of Directors have king power but not god power. Celebrities have god power but not king power.
Anyways long live wizard power; love that stuff.
I 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 guys with swords, or castle masons.
So I think the challenge is to make these experiments low risk, and intrinsically enjoyable in some way, so even if they fail you don’t lose out. And also be mindful of what domains are best to apply a wizard approach to, and which need the application of mundane forces at scale.
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 against making them yourself, and there are few people around to claim they look weird.
You didn’t have this in your article, but it’s also a good, cheap place to raise kids. It’s funny how much more worth it it is to make cool stuff when there are little ones around, always in awe of what you can do.
The 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 out into a productive enterprise.
I’ve rarely met someone who had such amazing ambitions matched with such a fine ability to execute. Truly inspirational.
One 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 knowledge in spellcasting is difficult to attain, and even if you succeed, the number of spells you can cast is still limited by the natural difficulty.
It seems what you want is not just orienting away from kings and towards wizards… I share that value, and it would be nice if more kings were themselves wizards… but more than that, you want more powerful wizards. You want it to be faster to cast better spells. Maybe I am projecting… for that is certainly what I want.
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.
I’d say actual king power is getting the parade to follow you regardless of the deviations.
Just as you probably aren’t a very good wizard if you can only make things you’ve already seen others make, you probably aren’t a very good king if you can only lead if you follow the parade.
Kings have power over people, wizards have power over everything else?
More like: kings have power via their ability to outsource to other people, wizards have power in their own right.
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, but causes me doubts. ( I think it is not quite correct because it is vulnerable to fake value gain, it turns out that a wizard programmer who created a useful program (entity) in the laboratory or an author who wrote a book is equal to a market sorcerer who picked up a manipulative script to inflate the value of papers that are only empty promises. Is there any way to separate the fake value?)
I was also amused by the fact that at some point we touched the magic pills. In my culture, there is a distrust of psychotropic drugs and the means of gross moderation of one’s mind, which are normalized in other countries, for well-known reasons related to the risks of using potions. On the other hand, it is logical that we should use magical means to win, if we have not been able to prevent magical diseases associated with the ability to create and the defeat of the Will, Power or… ability to implement them? Other aspects of the Gift.
Speaking of other ideas, isn’t there a limit to human ability? I don’t approve of my pessimistic tone, it’s disgusting to me, but… It seems that these things require understanding a complex system of secrets?
Not everything, and it’s worth the effort, but how good is it to put experiments on diseases in your basement?
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 its value and every rich person would lose a lot of their influence. And if you stop believing that homoeopathic sugar pills will stop your pain, their effect can become a lot lower. This kind of power is defined by the requirement that a critical mass within the social group has to continue believing in it.
What you described as ‘Wizard’ Power will not vanish in the same way, no matter who believes in it. That is real power. No matter who stops believing in your abilities, they still work.
You could also put the kinds of power on a spectrum. Something is closer to real power the less likely it is to vanish at a moments notice. Money is weaker than the possession of physical materials, for instance. “You cant eat money”. Social status is weaker than abilities.
One thing I would like to add in terms of a life-goal or life strategy. Learning how to make vaccines or microchips is cool, but it requires you to stay within some amount of financial stability. Using your metaphor, it is wizardry that requires a wand. If you sell your lithography machine for your next month’s rent (inequality is rising), the usefulness of your skill will vanish as quickly as the kings power during the French revolution.
I therefore find it prudent to start at the bottom assuming no possessions. One would hence start out with basic survival skills. Procuring calories, making necessary tools from trash or natural materials, solid first aid, making crude medicines, constructing shelter. One can then go on to other things like producing electricity and so on. Power becomes more real if it depends on less outside conditionals.
Learn being a human first, then go on to becoming a wizard.
Hey this sounds a bit like Arbor Summer Camp. Yeah this is a beautiful vision
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.
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.
I’m not sure I’m understanding your claim here. I don’t think you’re suggesting a “if you build it they will come” type result from being in a dominant position. But I also don’t quite get why being in a dominant position in one space has much (other that deep pockets) really impacts the success in doing things others are not doing—or leading a group in doing things others are not leading that group.
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 potency of “wizard” power relative to king power looks a lot different.
Wizard power can appear significant in society relative to king power in only 2 cases.
There is something inherently special about certain individuals allowing them to wield wizard power far beyond the combined strength of whatever army of lesser wizards a king could send against them.
Something about the technology, culture or nature of the fantasy world inherently sabotages attempts by individuals to group together into large packs to increase their collective power over others.
Option one is a nightmare scenario for anyone not blessed to be among the chosen few with potential above most others. Option two requires some creative world building to explain why it is that groups led by a king would not always expand to the size where they can always overpower those dedicated to wizard power.
Technological advances over the last few hundreds years have only allowed us to form larger and larger collectives and organize ourselves into groups with increasing ease. This train of thought really does make me wonder whether that pattern will necessarily continue. Or if some of technologies on the horizon might change the rules to once again discourage large collectives and for maybe the first time, give wizard power a real chance...
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
I think having a king at all might be positive sum though, via enabling of coordination.
I am someone who personally resonates with this “wizard-power” concept that you discuss of. But I believe there are potential risks. Namely, the risk of bad actors using tools, knowledge and social power/”king power” to conduct themselves in harmful ways. How far are we willing to allow people to create S-chiral genetic material rather than the R-form as a potential example?
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.