One of the main things fueling my agent-foundations research[1] is that, correctly interpreted, the activity is very much isomorphic to unraveling deep eldritch truths of reality, mastering them, and harnessing them towards the task of binding cosmic horrors. Complete with cautionary tales involving people going mad attempting it, apparently.
“Wizardry” is not quite the terminology I’m thinking in, but that is a quintessential wizard activity.
Wizard power… is far harder to obtain in great quantity, in our world
Yep. The general aesthetic you describe is, likewise, something that resonates with me. The image of constantly tinkering with independently conceived projects in a wide variety of domains, each of them harboring the ambition to push the frontier of what’s possible; regularly consuming new domains as the whim strikes and promptly starting to mess with them as well? That is the dream, since childhood.
But this is something where I’m very much feeling bottlenecked on intelligence and stamina. Not enough cognitive-bandwidth-multiplied-by-time to actualize this. Especially with the end-of-the-world deadline looming and all.
And the failure mode there is, well… 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.
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 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.)