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Orienting Toward Wizard Power — LessWrong

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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? I needed a Name. Not necessarily a full mathematical True Name, but a suffici

x Orienting Toward Wizard Power — LessWrong World Optimization Curated 2025 Top Fifty: 62 % 591 Orienting Toward Wizard Power by johnswentworth 8th May 2025 6 min read 148 591 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 wh

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