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 😭

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.

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.

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)

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

this post resonated with me more then anything else on this site, ever since i was a child my goal in life is to accumulate scientific knowledge and all the power that comes with it and build a lab where i can do what ever the hell i want, it is the very thing that got me into rationality to begin with and i think many people have gotten into rationality for the same reason.

i even manged to build a small workshop where i experimented with various chemicals and electronics and mechanical contraptions.

i also had a similar experience with burnout in university, i got into IT even though it wasn't my favorite subject because the job opportunities there (at that time at least) where much better the other faculties.

i haven't given up on my main goal, i just thought that if i can get a comfy job in software engineering i can then have all the money and free time to do what i want, basically i was trying to "suffer now and enjoy later" and went as far as to abandon my workshop.

it didn't go well, and suffered a burn out so bad i am still recovering form it now, i since moved into engineering and got some of my passion back.

i hope more posts like this are made on lesswrong, i think all the talk about X risk and AI i think many lesswrongers have burned out and lost their passion.

I like the terminology.  I have the opposite conclusion though, at least if "king power" means the power to convince others to do things.  There's a property to a world that determines whether wizard or king power is stronger and it's something like the variance or skew of ability*.  In worlds where one person can accomplish, on their own, as much physical change as hundreds or thousands of others, wizard power is superior to king power.  A powerful wizard with their magic will do more than a king with his army.  In worlds where there is low variance in ability, king power is superior.  

Many magical or anime worlds have high ability variance and training gains are linear or exponential instead of logarithmic or some other plateau function.  Our world appears to have low variance in ability.  For all the Chuck Norris memes, there is really no one who stands a chance against an army.  In unarmed combat, I'd guess that we cap out around 10x, even the best fighter in the world couldn't fight more than 10 average men simultaneously.  Other fields may have different ratios, but in general it seems easier to convince/pay a team of smart people to do X than to do it yourself.

If I could take Eliezer's or Nick Bostrom's belief about the importance of AI safety/alignment and transfer it to Trump, I would.

 

*technically the ratio of this and a convinceability factor, but most fictional worlds don't tend to alter convinceability.

Of course, wizards in the modern world depend on the structures that king power built, and not having those structures makes wizards way, way less useful than in the modern era.

More generally, the power to manipulate social reality is a hugely powerful ability, even if there are real constraints, and I generally think king power is less fake than you do (though relative to wizard power, king power makes it easier to produce ideas/tasks/materials/goods that don't work, due to the lack of obvious verification and worse feedback loops, due to the adversarial context).

In particular, it can bring you the technological progress necessary to solve problems, even if it's not a direct cause.

Management, delegation and social skills are very, very valuable and not fake.

In relation to AGI, I basically agree with Alex Mallen's comment here that king power is going to matter a lot if you want wizard power (except in very, very fast takeoff scenarios):

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Wg6ptgi2DupFuAnXG/orienting-toward-wizard-power#A3zuXoEiXYjET5ggr

I do think king/social power has a habit to be more fictional/constrained than wizard power, because it's harder to verify in social settings, often deliberately so, but I'd contest the claim that king power is universally/widely fictional, especially in practice.

You may like one of my posts: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vLrj4ZNcGCTMJqdXB/intelligence-as-privilege-escalation

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. One more thing I'll share by DM at some point in the next couple weeks.

Curated. The distinction in kinds of power feels reel. I feel like I highlight the "power of having resources" (e.g. money) which is perhaps part of king-power (though John doesn't list that) or another kind of power. 

I wonder if an effect is that living in a large well-developed economy of (i) cheap ready-made goods, and/or (ii) goods that are better due to specialized expertise, equipment, etc., there's a push against doing things yourself. Even with skills and tools, buying Ikea furniture might still be a better time/money trade-off for most. The b... (read more)

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)

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)

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

This resonated with me a lot. The wizard vs king power thing really clicked for something I've been feeling a lot lately. (And apparently I'm not the only one, your post had 320 upvotes when I wrote this comment lol)

I got into programming when I was a kid because I liked creating things, and it took me a long time to realize that generalized to physical creation too (I've only been getting into maker stuff for like a year). Vibeclipse (the TPOT event) kind of sparked the transition for me, but I think it just leveled up my agency, and the desire-to-create ... (read more)

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)

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

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

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)

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.

This post is useful for providing the handles “wizard power” (knowing concrete/grounded/gears-level models on how the world works) and “king power” (leading, managing, allocating, communicating, etc). I also think that the post insightfully points out how social gradients can often harmfully and myopically push people toward king power.

But I think johnwentsworth is wrong in saying that king power is “fake,” and that people should only aim for wizard power: in particular, it sure seems like coordination is an incredibly taught resource (as johnwentsworth hi... (read more)

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)

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)

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)

Thanks for the reminder that wizardry takes dedication to the learning and practice of the craft, even if that is not exactly what it says.

Wizard power would be a great session at LessOnline. I would attend!

This week I've been working with a few folks at Lighthaven, applying wizard power to make some social gizmos that should make for an interesting addition.

When you build something for a community like that I think you get something more than the sum of its parts. It's not a fusion device, but I think the concept fits well.

Along with pants and a water based air conditioner, might I suggest an industrial dishwasher? Those puppies can do a load every 30 seconds.

I love the article. You would make a good farmer. We don't have regulations out here in rural Iowa. You can do all your own plumbing and electrical work, and nobody will complain that it looks like a spider's web of wires in your basement. There are also plenty of broken down vehicles to fix, always more than you feel like fixing. Your clothes would break down quickly, so you would need hardier pants. There are no rules... (read more)

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)

One benefit of wizard power over king power is king power often involves fighting/competing with someone else for power, it’s zero-sum, while building wizard power involves fighting the world & is positive sum.

Fight the world before you fight others.

Creation Over Conflict.

Evokes thought of the turnip economy, gold economy, and wish economy...

Essentially, wizards are indeed weak in that the number of worthwhile spells a wizard can cast is measured in spells per decade. Want to use alteration magic to craft a better toothbrush? How many months are you willing to work on it... with that much effort, the economies of scale strongly suggest you should not make one, but a plan... a spell formula that others can cast many times to replicate the item.

It is nice to seek general knowledge, but the skill to actually make use of that k... (read more)

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.

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.

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)

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

This is the first post I’ve ever commented on— it’s weirdly relevant to my life right now. I’m in manufacturing workforce development. We’re looking at building training centers for CNC, casting, forging, vacuums, 3D printing, etc.. I love the way you’ve framed this and can relate. From bits to atoms. You should check out the reindustrialize community on X. 

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)

I stumbled across this exact concept from a different angle. My vision of wizardry came from a desire to be able to do significant and unpredictable things. Inspired by this, I put together a list of 200 hundred topics I'm vaguely interested in. I invite others to read the first dozen or so items on my list, then sit down for 30-60 minutes and create your own lists. Think up some of the many ways in which a bit of knowledge can help you better predict the world or a bit of skill can help you better influence it.

I think the difference between the two types of power, seems to be Intrinsic (Wizard) vs Extrinsic (King). The two are interrelated in that having one can confer the other if one wishes, but for the mortal human, the best path forward (i.e. the path I like the most and believe should be the path to the most combined W+K power for the highest proportion of people) seems to be seeking deep levels of wizard power and pursuing it in all areas. 

Side proposal: I occasionally get bursts of ingenuity, ideas and a desire to make them happen at night, like two ... (read more)

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)

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)

(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.)

I like the concept, but I think John misses some important points. I think it's typically not worth building skills such as CAD or plumbing because of how narrowly applicable they are and how long they take to learn. It's better to build higher-level skills such as searching for existing products, or commissioning people to do things for you. Or, at a larger scale, founding, hiring and fundraising.

I am someone who personally resonates with this "wizard-power" concept that you discuss of. But I believe there are potential risks. Namely, the risk of bad actors using tools, knowledge and social power/"king power" to conduct themselves in harmful ways. How far are we willing to allow people to create S-chiral genetic material rather than the R-form as a potential example?

Always try reversing and rephrasing things to see if they still make sense: "I want a toothbrush that's more durable than my teeth" sounds kind of silly.