18. Ambition in four measures: Rieseberg’s driver’s manual (2026-10-15)
From Felix Rieseberg (Anthropic, works on Claude), “How to be more ambitious: A tutorial for humans with models.” Source: https://felixrieseberg.com/how-to-be-more-ambitious-a-tutorial-for-humans-with-models/
He sorts ambition with AI into four measures: Speed (doing the same work faster — skipped), Altitude (abstraction level: from “fix this crash” up to “keep the app crash-free” — ask “what’s the goal beyond the goal”), Depth (field-expert depth: use the tools and methods of the top practitioners, until even the experts learn something), Range (cross-field: assemble a crew — analyst + journalist + editor + a red team of short sellers and forensic accountants — and have the model do what they do, not play them).
How it connects to these notes:
- The piece is essentially a “driver’s manual” — Altitude maps to point 3’s “intent and direction,” Depth to “keep your craft sharp,” Range to think tank review. My notes are the Chinese practitioner’s edition; his is the English methodology edition.
- The Depth chapter says it outright: “Use an outside judge — don’t let the model judge itself.” Points 4 and 5’s “use another AI to review” is industry-consensus methodology by now.
- “Insist on the same instruments used by the best”: asked to “act like an expert,” models often change vocabulary without changing methods — talks like a data scientist, hands you a markdown table. Echoes point 5: pretty form isn’t real method. The person reading the board (point 15) has to check what pieces are being played with.
- The closing psychology bit, self-efficacy: people who believe they can do it really do more; “watching someone do it first” (the four-minute mile was matched 46 days later), “not knowing it’s impossible” (Dantzig turned unsolved problems into homework). The counterpoint to point 14: the learning process really does get skipped — but AI also smashed the threshold for “daring to think big.”
Two doubts: the author works on Claude, so “models keep reaching higher abstraction levels” is partly selling his own product; the examples all assume data access and engineering infrastructure, a high bar for ordinary people. And Speed gets skipped — yet in reality 90% of people only ever use Speed. Ambition itself is pyramid-distributed.