“Orienting Toward Wizard Power” by johnswentworth

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 [...]

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Outline:

(01:19) In Search of a Name

(04:23) Near Mode

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First published:
May 8th, 2025

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

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.