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).

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 [LW(p) · GW(p)].) 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 it is less tied up in social realities. That attitude reminds me of your post.
• I share your desire to know about all those things you talk about. One of my friends has huge amounts of "wizard power", and I find this extremely charming/impressive/attractive. I would personally enjoy the LessWrong community more if the people here knew more of this stuff.
• I'm very skeptical that focusing on wizard power is universally the right strategy; I'm even more skeptical that learning the random stuff you list in this post is typically a good strategy for people. 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), because those topics aren't as relevant to the main strategies that I'm interested in for mitigating existential risk.
• You write "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." I think this is true in a collective sense--these problems require technological advancement--but it is absurd to say that the best way to improve the probability of getting to those things is to try to personally learn all of the scientific fields relevant to making those advancements happen. At the very least, surely there should be specialization! And beyond that, I think the biggest threat to eventual weekend trips to the moon is probably AI risk; on my beliefs, we should dedicate way more effort to mitigating AI risk than to tiny-dragon-R&D. Some people should try to have very general knowledge of these things, but IMO the main usecase for having such broad knowledge is helping with the prioritization between them, not contributing to any particular one of them!

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 [LW · GW] attempting it, apparently.

"Wizardry" is not quite the terminology I'm thinking in, but that is a quintessential wizard activity.

Wizard power… is far harder to obtain in great quantity, in our world

Yep. The general aesthetic you describe is, likewise, something that resonates with me. The image of constantly tinkering with independently conceived projects in a wide variety of domains, each of them harboring the ambition to push the frontier of what's possible; regularly consuming new domains as the whim strikes and promptly starting to mess with them as well? That is the dream, since childhood.

But this is something where I'm very much feeling bottlenecked on intelligence and stamina. Not enough cognitive-bandwidth-multiplied-by-time to actualize this. Especially with the end-of-the-world deadline looming and all.

And the failure mode there is, well... LARPing as a wizard. Delving into fields while only half-understanding them, starting a bunch of abortive, predictably useless toy projects that are obviously not going to go anywhere, such that an actual expert in the corresponding domain would've seen that at a glance; reinventing bicycles-but-worse. The whole thing just being a feel-good waste of your time. At best a dabbler, rather than a sorcerer.

One can certainly do dramatically better than the baseline here. But the realistic implementation probably still involves narrowing your wizardly expertise to a few domains, and spending most of your time tinkering with projects in them only. And, well, the state of the world being what it is, there's unfortunately a correct answer to the question regarding what those domains should be.

(Or maybe I'm being needlessly pessimistic cheems-mindset about this and I need to snap out of it.)

1. ^{^}

   "Fueling" as in "giving me the motivation to keep doing it even when it's not innately rewarding", rather than "actual sober reasons I'm doing it". The former is a subset of the latter.

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.

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 😭

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.

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.

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 case of the sort of thing I'd be willing to move and/or spend some money to make available to my family; highly aligned with my vision here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xNf9ZkjXLkFYPDscs/levels-of-republicanism [LW · GW]

I don't know how to move this forward but I'll try to reveal some information related to potential opportunities for collaboration:

• Automation of high-value massage
• Basic physical science education for a toddler
• Some things I can do

Automation of high-value massage

Recently a friend wrote to me asking for advice^[1] about how to use a massage gun effectively. Valentin Rozlomii ( visceralcure.com ) is the one I learned this from - I decided to try his services out when Michael Vassar told me he uses an infrared camera to find areas of the body that have poor circulation to the muscles (they're cold). One piece of advice I gave was that the muscles running along the spine are especially high leverage to work on, since if they're chronically tight they can impinge on major nerves innervating large sections of the body, so they can be responsible for a lot of referred pain. This is hard to get at with a massage gun for obvious anatomical reasons, but Valentin is working on a solution. Last I checked he's designing parts with a 3D printer but could use a mechanically inclined collaborator to get the whole thing working, so if you're interested I'd be happy to connect you.

Basic physical science education for a toddler

My 2 1/2 year old son Danny has various toy trains he plays with, including a couple Thomas the Tank Engine style trains. His Thomas is a Brio-style train you can push along a wooden track, but his Percy has an electric motor he can switch on and off that drives the wheels. When I found him touching Percy’s wheels to Thomas’s to drive Thomas's wheels with the power of Percy's motor, I decided he was ready to absorb information about gears and other simple machines.

The iPad "educational games on machines we could find seemed actively bad, and the main apparent transfer learning effect was that he started hitting his little brother.

One thing we tried was watching the David MacAulay cartoon series The Way Things Work, on YouTube. He hated it a few months prior when I offered it to him, but now he appreciates it some. We started with the episode on gears. When we got to an episode on flight, he was interested enough - and mentioned that he wanted to fly - that I looked up which kites were recommended on Metafilter and Reddit, and ended up buying an Into the Wind Kids’ Delta kite, which we flew on the next convenient windy day. I'm glad I bothered to find a nice one, as it flew noticeably more easily than the ones I remember from my childhood (which kind of put me off kites).

I bought a toy gear set from a local toy shop with bolts to attach them to a board, and drill bits you can put on either a fixed handle or a toy power drill to drive the bolts or the gears. He's getting proficient with that.

Another thing I did was order a bunch of educational kits through Walmart.com. He enjoyed helping me put together an LED-powered windmill (he handed me the screws) and was excited to go out and see the wind turn the blades fast enough to power the light. He likes playing with the pulley set we ordered, but it’s flimsy, and I’d like to buy or build him a better one. Other kits I have queued up:

• Water purification kit
• Electric motor circuit kit
• Battery-powered fan circuit kit
• Fruit battery powered light circuit kit
• Magic Schoolbus 10-activity mechanics kit we found at Barnes and Noble for $10 - haven’t looked carefully at it yet.

Danny’s also interested in the idea of rockets and I’d love to give him some safe practical experience with very simple rocketry principles, so I wrote to a localish rocketry group asking if anyone would be interested in showing him what they know.

All this is an inferior substitute to having friends doing interesting physical work that they are happy to explain and demonstrate to their very young new friend. Our live-in landlord is happy to let Danny watch and when safe and convenient participate in the home improvements he does. In another year or so Danny might be ready to learn some basic carpentry from the father of a childhood friend of mine if he's willing to teach. Designing and bulding his own kite might actually be a good craft project for him after he's able to draw simple shapes like rectangles freeform.

Some things I can do

I've invested a fair amount of time into cooking. I often optimize on time-quality tradeoffs but frequently throw things together from why's laying around that impresses people. When I lived in Harlem there was a Paulownia tree with branches touching our balcony. I looked it up and found the flowers were edible, so I made cheese omelettes with Paulownia flowers for houseguests. Eventually I set up a drip agriculture garden on the balcony to grow herbs, which are relatively high value per square inch of space. We didn't have an outdoor tap, so I bought a rain bucket to feed the drip system, and filled it up with a hose running from the kitchen sink about once a week.

I also have some accumulated knowledge on simple nutritional health hacks that seem to frequently get good results when people bother to try them (e.g. for anxiety, try magnesium BEFORE trying benzos, the side effect profile is much milder and MANY people are deficient in magnesium).

I'm not an expert at Tai Chi but I can teach a few things about balance; this causes people to think I'm a lot stronger than I am because with clear consciousness of balance (center of mass etc) it's much easier to pick up heavy objects and move them around without much strain. Looking into Feldenkrais and other paradigms has given me an implied catalog of cheap-to-try mind-body heuristics that some friends report legit helping them, which I only bring up in conversation when I have reason to think they'd be actually useful (e.g. a friend reported hip problems that made me suggest wearing an eyepatch sometimes, which seemed to help with identifying and fixing lateral asymmetries).

1. ^{^}

   Here's my whole response to the friend in case anyone could use the info.

   A few principles & heuristics:

   • If you are already readily conscious of the sensation in a muscle, and know how to move it through its full range of motion under normal loads, then the only reason to massage it is to transiently relax it in order to access muscles under it. Blank spots, ticklish spots, extremely tender muscles, or very weak or chronically shortened muscles are good candidates for massage.
   • Pay attention to which muscles are partial or total antagonists. If you have conscious trouble with one muscle, check for its antagonist or other muscles in the cluster to see whether one of those is a better candidate for focus.
   • Start with fast vibrations to superficially relax, work up to slower deep penetration.
   • If you start feeling warmth or itching that's a good sign that you're oxygenating tissue that needed it. Ideally go deeper once the warmth/itching fades. I don't have a strong sense of whether it's good or bad to push through some muscle pain in the process; Valentin seemed to think it was fine as long as it's not so painful that you involuntarily brace or something. But plausibly it would be more effective in the long run to be more patient. FAFO I guess.
   • The muscles running along the spine just to each side are particularly high-leverage since it's common for them to be weak and tight, and they impinge on major nerves that innervate much of the body. You won't be able to reach them well at some spinal latitudes holding a massage gun yourself - Valentin is developing a machine to help with that - but a partner or a lacrosse ball can help. Twisting around the point in various ways once you've got some pressure on it can help too.
   • Looking up images or videos of e.g. the deep shoulder muscles (rotator cuff, pectoralis minor, serratus, etc), the deep hip/abdominal muscles (e.g. iliacus and psoas) was helpful for me.

A few points:

1. All of these things sound obviously awesome and fun to do
2. Cooking is imo another class of wizardry
3. 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.

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.

 

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.

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

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

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.

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

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. 

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 cheaper and easier to just buy more toothbrushes. Or, run hot water over the bristles, squeeze them back into shape, then run cold water over them. Or just keep chewing on a flat looking toothbrush. 

(Also, you want your toothbrush to be less wear resistant than your teeth, as your toothbrush is easier to replace)

Wizard-power is pretty weak when you are just making something for yourself. It only really shines with economies of scale. Some of that economy of scale is in owning the tools. Some is in understanding the particular details of the domain. 

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 noise of the great men, and stung all over with the stings of the little ones. 

Forest and rock know how to be silent with you. Be like the tree which you love, the broad-branched one -- silently and attentively it overhangs the sea. 

Where solitude ends, there begins the market-place; and where the market-place begins, there begins also the noise of the great actors, and the buzzing of the poison-flies. 

In the world even the best things are worthless without those who make a side-show of them: these showmen, the people call great men. 

Little do the people understand what is great -- that is to say, the creator. But they have a taste for all showmen and actors of great things. 

Around the creators of new values revolves the world: -- invisibly it revolves. But around the actors revolve the people and the glory: such is the course of things."

Your king is clearly the showman, and I think that the wizard can be the creator of new values if he decides to share his discoveries with the rest of the world. And around the creators of new values revolves the world. For The parallel with Nietzsche and your post holds if we slightly extend the definition of 'new values,' but why not?

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 pendulum swings back, and eventually you find out that letting yourself get nerd sniped by random things does have some hidden benefits? I guess I will find out in a few years (if we are alive).

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 was already there.

I'm still very low level with making stuff, the sorts of things I make are like, laser-cut lamps or a deck of custom metal tarot cards, or a wooden plaque for scanning the house's wifi password. Pretty trinkets, nothing like vaccines or biotech research!

But even so, there's something about it that feels right in a way that's hard to explain. A focus on the end result, a dedication to improving skills. The way you described the toothbrush, wanting something that you couldn't simply buy—that's a very familiar feeling underlying all my maker projects. When I create something it's completely unique.

I held on to that thought, for a few days. Some time back in college, I’d decided not to build CAD skills; it seemed like too much of a time sink. That was a mistake, wasn’t it? If I wanted to make a nice toothbrush, the main thing I’d need was basic CAD skills, a bit of money for a one-off injection molding job, some research to figure out more robust bristle materials, plus a little elbow grease to assemble it all.

You could also 3d print it and then seal it, in which case you could get by without true CAD and use something simpler like Blender or Plasticity.

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 somewhat king-like position, but I largely have the position due to it being one that nobody really wants and I myself would be happy to abdicate it to anyone who did want it. But everybody just wants to either chill or focus on wizarding, and we only have a chairperson because we need a legal entity for our finances and the law says that the legal entity has to have a chairperson so somebody has to do it.

Relevant siderea quote, that rings very true in my experience:

One of the things about being the King for a people, is that you get blamed. Even for things that aren't your fault. Even for things beyond your control. Even for crappy-ass reasons like, "I'm scared and pissed off and you, you're in charge here, so I'll vent my feelings against you."

This is the challenging part of caring. If you demonstrate a concern for the wellbeing of the people in your people, they will start seeing their wellbeing as your concern. Start taking responsibility for how things go in a group, and people will start seeing you as responsible for how things go in a group.

This, right here, is what causes many people to back away from Kingship. Which is their right, of course. It's totally legitimate to look at that deal and say, "Oh, hell no."

Our society tells us that being King is awesome and everyone – well, everyone normal – wants to be one. "Every body wants to rule the world." No, actually, they don't. My experience tells me that most people are very reluctant to step into the job of King, and this consequence of the role is a primary reason why. People who, even knowing this consequence, are still willing to have authority rest on their shoulders are not at all that common.

I don't particularly expect to be blamed for things, but it sure would be a lot easier to drop the chairperson position and I know that people would be fine with me doing that. People have told me that they appreciate me doing the role so I do get some reward for it, but mostly it's just my sense of duty keeping me there and the social incentive would be for me to find something easier.

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 expand your knowledge of how to cure aging in more and more cases. And to obtain weekend trips to the moon, idk I guess you'd want some solar -> rocket fuel conversion plant + something to mass produce heat shielding + reusable rockets? I don't know what you need for tiny genetically engineered dragons and I kind of suspect it's a difficulty level above the others.

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 [LW · GW] .

• 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 that other people don't care enough about to go do themselves.
  • "This thing did not exist, and I needed it to. No one else was going to make it do, so I did it myself (or maybe got someone else to help or follow my plans)."
  • I think this is where people are coming from when they recommend makerspaces. I, too, recommend makerspaces, but also see later on about the League of Nondark Evil
• "What happened to that guy? Where’s the part of me which did that sort of thing?"
  • Is this about personal augmentation and power? About maniacal scientific self-experimentation? About planning and enacting? Which of those feels right? (Or some secret fourth thing.)
  • All of these have different overlapping sets of things-to-try.
• A desire to be part of a community, some kind of League of Evil-but-not-Dark, of other people taking unilateral actions that they think best, and somehow still getting along with each other and spurring each other on, to grander Evil Schemes
  • Evil here should be best understood in the sense of "self-centered, unilateral, directed towards empowerment (with others' potential suffering treated as an externality/side-effect/out-of-scope rather than a desideratum, which would instead be Dark).
• Something about depression and mental health, and having the link between desire and fulfillment have atrophied or been cut
  • I think this is where people are coming from when they recommend buproprion. I can't recommend it out of a lack of experience but asking a psych about it is on the top of that particular to-do sublist's stack.
  • More expressively and precisely, less neatly: Having your brain's predictive-engine+mental-effort-budgeter be negatively-biased regarding the predicted outcomes of plans and thus clamp down on your precious supply of Gumption, and being horrified and sad about that, and wanting to do something about that, and being trapped by that very same piss-trickle of Gumption you're now limited to.

• A desire for personal empowerment/enrichment/?command?; a syntonia related to resourcefulness and curiosity and clean planning/execution/development loops?

   

  Anyway: I like the vibe. It's something that I feel pretty strongly and to some extent I think it's what a lot of my hobbies are pointed at pursuing, in a variety of ways. Wizard Power seems like an important spiritual vitamin, and both one that it can be hard and finnicky to get and also not one it seems like everyone really needs. I need it, and it sounds like you need it.

  I endorse cooking being one of a handful of workable sources of standout-seeming magic wizard power in this way. I think it's worthwhile to try and I am happy to help you and maybe other people who I know and who ask me to, to do some interesting/fun cooking projects. At some points in my life, getting to play around experimenting with foods has been my main source of that felt sense of soul-nourishment, or at least a pica-replacement for it. Cloning recipes is one option; for a cantrip, if you don't already tinker with technically-prepared food (canned soups, say, or ramen), you can start. I could talk about cooking projects I've done in the past, if that helped?

  I also really like the idea of "let's do a thing-you-can-in-fact-just-do and become more capable/powerful/knowledgeable, in a fairly fun and lighthearted way, rather than just while away this period of time in dissipated enjoyment". If you end up seriously doing something of this type during the Lighthaven Festival Season or something, I will very likely participate seriously. Sewing would be a good one - I don't really know how and I value tailoring and the fabric arts all the more for it; loved ones like @WhatsTrueKittycat [LW · GW] and both grandmothers have won my heart with the Wizard Power of their enduring fiber arts and ongoing repairs thereto. I'll keep an eye out for if you end up doing that.

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. Something to bear in mind.

Some more observations: when Alchemists accidentally stumble on something Kings want, Kings usually come and take it. Sensible Kings employ Wizards for counsel, not Alchemists (but they keep Alchemists under watch and maybe try to point them at stuff). In a common-knowledge confrontation between a King and a Wizard, the King usually wins. The Alchemist has no chance against either, they just have to hope and assume they haven't offended anyone too much.

King power is pretty real actually, it just isn't held entirely by the King. The King is a coordinator, a director, and a leviathan, which accrues much more coherence to the subjects than without. Potent. Not always (though often) to the benefit of the King.

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?

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 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.

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 the middle to increase contraction length for the same amount of energy expenditure) and medical grade silicone tubing, fishing wire for tendons, PLA for 3d printed anatomically accurate bones, liquid latex or shrink wrap for synovial capsules and mineral oil or Vaseline for synovial fluid, catheter syringes for hydraulic pressure for the muscles at first, but then off the shelf microfluidic devices with maybe an Arduino controller, then possibly RPNI with machine learning to make it a fully functional prosthetic. The professional tech seems so close now though it's a little discouraging.

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.

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.

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 knowledge in spellcasting is difficult to attain, and even if you succeed, the number of spells you can cast is still limited by the natural difficulty.

It seems what you want is not just orienting away from kings and towards wizards... I share that value, and it would be nice if more kings were themselves wizards... but more than that, you want more powerful wizards. You want it to be faster to cast better spells. Maybe I am projecting... for that is certainly what I want.

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 potency of "wizard" power relative to king power looks a lot different. 

Wizard power can appear significant in society relative to king power in only 2 cases.

1. There is something inherently special about certain individuals allowing them to wield wizard power far beyond the combined strength of whatever army of lesser wizards a king could send against them.
2. Something about the technology, culture or nature of the fantasy world inherently sabotages attempts by individuals to group together into large packs to increase their collective power over others. 

Option one is a nightmare scenario for anyone not blessed to be among the chosen few with potential above most others. Option two requires some creative world building to explain why it is that groups led by a king would not always expand to the size where they can always overpower those dedicated to wizard power. 

Technological advances over the last few hundreds years have only allowed us to form larger and larger collectives and organize ourselves into groups with increasing ease. This train of thought really does make me wonder whether that pattern will necessarily continue. Or if some of technologies on the horizon might change the rules to once again discourage large collectives and for maybe the first time, give wizard power a real chance...

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 or three times a year. I will now be calling them Wizarding Hours. If anyone has suggestions on how to make these moments of inspiration and seemingly endless idea generation happen more often, please share. 

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 - it seems to me like it is mostly for fun, and in the end the novelty wears off a bit once I realize that building something actually useful will take way more time than I want to spend on non-AI safety work. 

But maybe that is something I shouldn't have given up on that quickly, perhaps it is a bit of "magic" that makes life fun and maybe even a few actually cool inventions could come from this kind of tinkering. And maybe that would also permeate into how I approach my AI safety work. 
 

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 specifically topic that you're sure nobody else cares much about, and develop a large social network of people who similarly specialize.  If you have a task that requires specialist knowledge of two disciplines, it's hard for me to tell if you win by having two specialists who learn to work together, or having two generalists who cross train in both, but not as deeply.

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 [LW(p) · GW(p)]

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.