Published on May 8, 2025 5:23 AM GMT
For months, I had the feeling: something is wrong. Some core part of myself had gone missing.
I had words and ideas cached, which pointed back to the missing part.
There was the story of Benjamin Jesty, a dairy farmer who vaccinated his family against smallpox in 1774 - 20 years before the vaccination technique was popularized, and the same year King Louis XV of France died of the disease.
There was another old post which declared “I don’t care that much about giant yachts. I want a cure for aging. I want weekend trips to the moon. I want flying cars and an indestructible body and tiny genetically-engineered dragons.”.
There was a cached instinct to look at certain kinds of social incentive gradient, toward managing more people or growing an organization or playing social-political games, and say “no, it’s a trap”. To go… in a different direction, orthogonal to that one. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on the name of that orthogonal direction.
There was that time I made a batch of RadVac. What happened to that guy? Where’s the part of me which did that sort of thing?
In Search of a Name
I needed a Name. Not necessarily a full mathematical True Name, but a sufficiently robust summary of what I’d lost that I could rebuild it and stabilize it so it wouldn’t go missing again.
It had something to do with power. I knew Names for some kinds of power, even full-blown proper True Names for two types, dominance and bargaining power, but those were the wrong types. Those were Names for two kinds of power which kings wield. I needed to point away from that, toward some other kind of power. If not kings, what archetype would wield the kind of power I needed to point toward?
Wizards.
That was it. There is the power of kings, and then there is the power of wizards.
The social incentive gradient will almost always push one toward king-power. But it’s mostly fake, mostly a trap. Like a bank which only actually holds a fraction of your deposit, but without all the other depositors and insurers which make banks actually work. Most king power is… marching in front of the parade, acting like you’re leading it, when really the parade has a route of its own. Deviate more than a little from the route, and the parade will cease to follow you. Ask for things which aren’t already on the market, and no one will know how to get them for you, nor will you know what you need to do to get people to produce them.
Wizard power… is far harder to obtain in great quantity, in our world. Part of the fantasy appeal of wizards is just how much they can do how easily, when in the real world wizard power is so much weaker than in fantasy. It’s being able to weld or sew, knowing how to use CAD tools and 3D printers and CNC machines, working with electronic circuits or writing code, building a house or installing plumbing or wiring, genetically editing bacteria. Even in social domains - e.g. deep knowledge of bureaucratic structure or case law conveys social wizard power, circling and pickup artistry and non-violent communication each convey their own form of social wizard power. Real world wizards do not beat armies. But at least wizard power isn’t fake. It isn’t always fungible across tasks, which means the wizard powers one has aren’t always right for the problem at hand. But at least wizard power is always 100% real; it’s never fake in the way that so much king power is fake.
And crucially… most people just don’t optimize that hard for increasing their wizard power. The social incentive gradient is toward king power. So even if the wizardry of fantasy is out of reach, one can do far better than baseline. One can grow so much stronger in wizard power.
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.
That resonated.
Seek wizard power, not king power.
It wasn’t all of what I’d lost, but it was enough to begin to rebuild and stabilize.
Near Mode
What happened to the guy that made a batch of RadVac?
That guy didn’t just abstractly want wizard power. To that guy, wizard power was immediate, real, near mode, it was as immediate as going out to the store to get milk.
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.
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.
Then I remembered: for years, 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. From a wetlab to a shop, injection molding machine to atomic force microscope, vacuum equipment and cleanroom, maybe even a lightweight chip fab. I hadn’t even thought of that dream in… two years? Four? About as long as that core part of myself had been slowly going missing.
That was the right direction to move toward, on the margin.
What else do I want besides a more robust toothbrush, which markets don’t seem to provide very readily? A nice tailored pair of pants which won’t fall apart or look like trash if I throw them in the washing machine; tailors always use delicate materials and assume you’ll dry-clean it. A water-cooled air conditioner; they’re flatly superior and a common choice for industrial-strength air conditioners, but for some reason cheap consumer versions aren’t available. Decoration for my apartment which is cheap, but not so boringly bland as most everything today.
So now I’m working on those things, in my spare time. The pants are up first.
I saw the announcement for LessOnline. Last year it was okay, but it didn't really excite me. What would excite me? I wish for the sort of weekend conference where there might be a session in which people make their own pair of pants, and another in which people CAD up and then 3D print some simple object, and another in which we walk through how to use the sound equipment for the event, and another in which we build a nice-looking fake tree, and then another in which we walk through how to use a gene gun or a mass spec or a desktop sequencer or …. A session on making a website or training a neural net would be good too, but they shouldn’t be 95% of the event, because in this social circle it’s been done to death already. A day-or-two-long session in which we build a simple fusion device, covering all the basics of vacuum and high-voltage equipment along the way, would be perfect. Or a shorter session in which participants disassemble and then reassemble a small combustion engine. Social wizardry events would be great too - a “read the entire US government manual” event would be great, or a “cram session for the bar exam except none of us have ever been to law school at all”, or “read the annual reports of the 100 companies which account for the majority of physical capital assets in the US”, or even just a session in which we go through the entirety of the day’s Federal Register release.
… that’s where I’m at, right now. It would be cool if that felt right to other people too. I feel like I’d be more whole, or more the-shape-I-want-to-be, with a community centered and grounded more around building wizard power.
Forget RadVac. 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.
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