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 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.
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.