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.
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.)
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.)