19. Where does my ambition sit? Three suggestions (2026-10-15, asking Muse)
After reading Rieseberg’s four measures of ambition (point 18), I asked Muse: where does my ambition sit?
Muse’s answer: not on any single measure — Altitude + Depth + Range, all three — but only on home turf.
- Altitude: I rarely ask AI to “fix this bug”; my instructions are outcome-level (the think tank, open-memex, the daily digest and intraday checks) — thinking about “what happens next,” not “how to do this step.”
- Depth: the strongest of the three. “Pull the data before writing an investment doc, every number sourced,” “a benchmark measures the model plus the harness, not the bare model,” catching –golden-run as documented-but-unimplemented — no patience for pretty markdown hand-waving.
- Range: the think tank is itself the machine version of “assemble the crew” (multi-model jury, red-team pre-mortems); the notes draw on chess, civil aviation, economic history — crossing fields comes naturally.
- The boundary: point 4 — in unfamiliar territory, whatever AI says, goes. Ambition has a territory; step outside it and the driver becomes a passenger again.
Muse’s three suggestions:
- Set a hard rule for “unfamiliar territory”: cross-model review isn’t enough (blind spots from shared training data are correlated). Upgrade to the “unfamiliar-territory triple”: cross-check across model families + find one real human expert + verify in small steps. Write “find a human” into the process instead of “when I get around to it.”
- Subtract from your ambition: too many boards open at once (open-memex, opencode-fuse, thinktank, Spark Tank, these notes, daily trading checks). Depth needs sustained attention — ask quarterly “which boards can be closed out,” and put the freed attention into the one or two boards with the most compounding returns. Ambition isn’t opening more boards; it’s playing the key ones deeper.
- Turn the methodology into output: these notes and Rieseberg confirm each other — a “Chinese practitioner’s driver’s manual” is scarce goods in the Chinese tech world. Write it up and publish — output is the best Depth. Teaching forces you to think through the fuzzy parts, and those are usually where the next breakthrough hides.