Orienting Toward Wizard Power

I tend to brush hard

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).

[-]Austin Weisgrau4mo3524

And, at risk of quashing OP's admirable spirit, a more "robust" toothbrush would exacerbate the relevant harms

[-]Stephen Fowler4mo6833

I think it is entirely in the spirit of wizardry that the failure comes from achieving your goal with unintended consequences.

7Aristotelis Kostelenos4mo

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.

2omarshehata4mo

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.

7krs3mo

Yeah, johnswentworth should consider an electric toothbrush with a pressure sensor. There are multiple models available for <$50.

[-]Buck4mo*7110

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

... (read more)

[-]johnswentworth4mo205

Glad you liked it!

I'm very skeptical that focusing on wizard power is universally the right strategy. 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)...

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 fou... (read more)

[-]Buck4mo123

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.

6CronoDAS4mo

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.)

[-]johnswentworth4mo192

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?

[-]Buck4mo100

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).

7Thane Ruthenis4mo

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.

[-]Nate Sharpe4mo553

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 😭

[-]Thane Ruthenis5mo5324

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.

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... ... (read more)

[-]johnswentworth5mo148

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.

[-]Thane Ruthenis4mo154

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.)

[-]cousin_it5mo528

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.

[-]Dweomite5mo3116

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.

[-]FiftyTwo4mo176

On my model, the strongest individual people around are kings, but adding more kings doesn't typically make civilization stronger

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.

2Anton Hengst4mo

Gut instinct is that the number of kings needed to maximally coordinate a number of wizards is somewhere around logarithmic.

9jmh4mo

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.

6Dweomite4mo

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.)

3jmh4mo

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.

4tailcalled5mo

I think it would be more accurate to say that wizards transmute. "Creation" actually requires resources, so it's not creation from nothing.

[-]Dweomite4mo1811

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.

2tailcalled4mo

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.

2Purplehermann4mo

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

2[comment deleted]4mo

[-]Yaroslav Granowski5mo2618

Seek wizard power, not king power.

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.

6ChristianKl4mo

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.

3Kinrany4mo

This maps to king power to me.

2Raemon4mo

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

[-]Alex Mallen4mo2411

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.

[-]CronoDAS4mo166

Especially in the age of AGI, leaders may no longer need to respect the values of most people because they're not economically relevant.

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.

1Aprillion4mo

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)

1Alex Mallen4mo

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.

[-]RerM4mo206

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.

[-]Benquo4mo191

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 ca... (read more)

[-]FiftyTwo4mo101

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,

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.

3DusanDNesic4mo

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!

5Benquo3mo

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/

2tcheasdfjkl4mo

wait can you explain the hip problems/eyepatch thing?

6Benquo4mo

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

[-]Ulisse Mini3mo*188

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... (read more)

[-]Garrett Baker4mo184

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.

5David Lorell4mo

🫡 I have pitched him. (Also agreed strongly on point 1. And tentatively agree on your point about the primary bottleneck.)

[-]stavros4mo1712

I'm curious about this pitch :)

[-]David Lorell4mo7418

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 duri... (read more)

[-]Regex4mo*201

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... (read more)

4David Lorell4mo

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.

[-]Hopenope4mo*130

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.

2Garrett Baker4mo

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.

5Hopenope4mo

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.

1Garrett Baker4mo

Yeah, I figured something like that would be going on if I was wrong, thanks!

1Aristotelis Kostelenos4mo

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...

[-]Raemon4mo134

I also had a pretty similar experience.

6Lorxus3mo

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.

3jmh4mo

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.

[-]johnswentworth4mo1611

Interesting though about using it to improve one's performance rather than just as an antidepressant or aid to quit smoking.

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.

3ChristianKl4mo

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".

4Elizabeth3mo

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.

1amitlevy494mo

I assume the idea is that bupropion is good at giving you the natural drive to do the kind of projects he describes?

2ChristianKl4mo

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.

2Garrett Baker4mo

Not really, the hypothesis is that John has depression, and of all the antidepressants, bupropion is the best (if it works for you).

6David Lorell4mo

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.

4Garrett Baker4mo

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.

[-]Jan_Kulveit4mo177

Such events do exist - you can come to a Fabric camp.

[-]don't_wanna_be_stupid_any_more4mo120

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.

[-]k644mo118

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.

[-]Noosphere894mo1110

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.

[-]eca2mo92

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... (read more)

[-]johnswentworth2mo1212

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.

[-]β-redex4mo92

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 pe... (read more)

7johnswentworth4mo

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.

2tailcalled4mo

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?

5StartAtTheEnd4mo

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 reme

[-]Cole Wyeth5mo91

[-]Gurkenglas5mo90

so you want to be powerful among wizards, huh? I suppose you can go join one of the wizard clubs and start acquiring underlings

8johnswentworth5mo

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.

[-]Ustice5mo3114

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.

8johnswentworth4mo

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.

6ChristianKl4mo

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.

1Ustice4mo

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.

6tailcalled5mo

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.

4Gurkenglas4mo

Yeah, the underling part was a joke :D

3Sergii4mo

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

[-]Raemon4mo82

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.

[-]johnswentworth4mo101

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.

4Raemon4mo

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?)

2johnswentworth4mo

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.

7Mateusz Bagiński4mo

"Maker Power"?

3Lorxus4mo

Fabricate suggests otherwise. What if you just feel like maxing out mundane economicmagic of which Prestidigitation is the example par excellence?

[-]plex5mo82

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.

[-]Ruby4mo70

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 b... (read more)

[-]Donald Hobson4mo70

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.

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... (read more)

[-]Saighi Paul4mo70

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 ... (read more)

[-]Sergii5mo75

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.

7tailcalled4mo

I think a lot of the participants are bottlenecked on a lack of important problems that they dare attempt to solve.

[-]Benquo3mo60

You might be more interested in Porcfest than LessOnline: https://substack.com/home/post/p-167363791

[-]datawitch4mo60

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 ... (read more)

[-]Kaj_Sotala4mo62

This is a neat and inspirational post! Minor nitpick:

The social incentive gradient will almost always push one toward king-power

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 somew... (read more)

4FiftyTwo4mo

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.

[-]tailcalled5mo62

I feel like this is optimizing for the general factor of wizard powers, but if you actually want:

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.

... 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 e... (read more)

[-]Dr. Birdbrain3mo51

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

... (read more)

[-]Lorxus4mo50

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 t

... (read more)

[-]Oliver Sourbut4mo50

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. Somethin... (read more)

[-]ChristianKl4mo50

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?

7nim4mo

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.

2jmh4mo

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.

4nim4mo

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.

2ChristianKl4mo

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?

6nim4mo

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.

[-]amitlevy494mo53

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.

[-]Gram Stone5mo50

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 th... (read more)

2johnswentworth4mo

Wow I'm surprised I've never heard of that class, sounds awesome! Thank you.

[-]Garrett Baker4mo170

FYI (cc @Gram_Stone) the 2023 course website has (~~poor quality~~ edit: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.

[-]Aspiring Wizard3mo40

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 ... (read more)

[-]Anton Hengst4mo40

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 m... (read more)

[-]FiftyTwo4mo40

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... (read more)

[-]ScottN4mo40

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.

[-]Duncan Haldane4mo40

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.

[-]eyesack4mo4-2

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... (read more)

[-]sturb4mo40

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 ou... (read more)

[-]Tyler Kolota4mo40

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.

[-]TristanTrim4mo42

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 k... (read more)

[-]nim4mo40

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.

[-]p4mo30

Deviate more than a little from the route, and the parade will cease to follow you.

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.

[-]Matthew Cook4mo30

Kings have power over people, wizards have power over everything else?

5johnswentworth4mo

More like: kings have power via their ability to outsource to other people, wizards have power in their own right.

[-]Тернай4mo30

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, bu... (read more)

[-]hammer_polish4mo30

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... (read more)

1hammer_polish4mo

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.

[-]Yoav4mo30

Hey this sounds a bit like Arbor Summer Camp. Yeah this is a beautiful vision

[-]Crystal Bentley4mo30

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.

[-]David Corbitt4mo30

Deviate more than a little from the route, and the parade will cease to follow you

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.

2jmh4mo

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.

[-]WWM4mo30

in the real world wizard power is so much weaker than in fantasy.

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 pote... (read more)

[-]Macusuweru4mo30

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.

[-]C F4mo30

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 ... (read more)

[-]Ariel_4mo30

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

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 -... (read more)

[-]RedMan5mo30

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 ... (read more)

[-]Duncan Sabien (Inactive)4mo20

(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.)

[-]David Corbitt4mo21

the bottleneck is wizard power, not king power.

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.

2Ruby4mo

I think having a king at all might be positive sum though, via enabling of coordination.

[-]14nw3mo10

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?

[-]NickH4mo10

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.

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