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Compounding Knowledge

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Re: Compounding Knowledge

#61

Post by Kye »

yetihehe wrote: post #36
collyw wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can google for two, no? Seems like a good deal of my job as a software engineer.

If you know what to google for. It happened many times to me that I was unable to even know what/how to search for something or didn't know someone already solved that problem in ingenious ways and every specialist knew that, but I wasn't a specialist. I'm a programmer but when I watch machining videos on YT I discover solutions to problems I've never thought would exist.

This is circle of competence, another common topic on Farnam Street. It's knowing what you don't know so you can find out rather than puff up and fake it.

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#62

Post by hyperpape »

bgroat wrote: post #55
stakhanov wrote: post #2

I wonder to what extent Warren Buffet is Warren Buffet because of how he thinks and acts (like all of these non-fiction authors selling books by using his name would have us believe), and to what extent he is the product of media selection bias. -- If you take a large enough group of people who take risky stakes that are large enough (like the world of financial asset management), then one of them is bound to be as s…

Funnily enough, Buffett actually calculated this in his essay "The Super Investors of Graham and Doddsville" Basically, advocates of the Free Market Hypotheses believed that it was impossible for anyone to deliberately, repeatedly generate alpha. The market was rational, and success was probabilistically distributed. With a large enough population, you will get Buffett level returns - therefor Buffett is a fluke. How…

I think you mean "efficient-market hypothesis".

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#63

Post by flexie »

csomar wrote: post #41

This article is full of bul . Here is another article where WB suggests that you don't need such a big a brain: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/12/heres-the-iq-score-warren-bu... There are many things going on here: 1. WB came at a time where little IQ could get you a lot ahead. People were not skilled. There was a time where some knowledge of writing, reading and basic math could make a factory director. Now the same k…

Warran Buffet did indeed have a couple million USD when he was in his 30s, back 55 years ago when a couple of million were worth around 20 million in today's money. Measured in today's money he probably had 2 million at some point in his mid/late 20s. He became a billionaire at 50-something.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/378439/net-worth-of-warr...

https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=2400000&year1=...

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#64

Post by lm28469 »

sametmax wrote: post #33
keiferski wrote: post #10

This concept is essentially the reason why “being able to quickly google the answers to questions” is inferior to “learning, knowing and remembering the answer.” The former treats a piece of information as an independent, context-free item, while the latter allows you to “digest” the information and understand the answer at a deeper level, to the point where it changes the types of questions you ask. Unfortunately ou…

There is a balance here. Yes, I'm incredibly more productive in Python because I know the stdlib and most frameworks and tools API by heart. But it took me 10 years of practice, and my daily rate is way more than it used to be. I'll also refuse a lot of gigs outright. You want juniors to be able to work too, and you can't expect them to know the entire world. Yet they can be useful, worth the money, and a great addit…

That's if you limit the scope of the article to IT only though.

If you extend the scope to your entire life it's vastly different. It's easy to feel smart because you have all the (written) knowledge of the world at the tips of your fingers at any time.

I know people who constantly talk about articles they read earlier in the day, etc ... information get diluted from 10s studies, to an article, to a recap of the article this guy read, to this guy talking about the 10% of the article he remembers.

Sure it's fun and interesting but it's not "learning" or "knowledge", in 2 weeks he won't even remember it.

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#65

Post by jshowa3 »

keiferski wrote: post #10

This concept is essentially the reason why “being able to quickly google the answers to questions” is inferior to “learning, knowing and remembering the answer.” The former treats a piece of information as an independent, context-free item, while the latter allows you to “digest” the information and understand the answer at a deeper level, to the point where it changes the types of questions you ask. Unfortunately ou…

Fortunately, Google exists so you can learn new things and develop foundational knowledge. Its all about what you do with the knowledge, and has little to do with the fact that you're Googling.

For example, I was Googling how to create a VM hypervisor last night in FreeBSD. I know very little about hypervisors, but I've read many blog posts and now I know what they are, what they do, how to setup failover clusters, etc.

The point is, people don't really sit and read the things they look up. That's the bigger problem.

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#66

Post by donaldknuth123 »

keiferski wrote: post #10

This concept is essentially the reason why “being able to quickly google the answers to questions” is inferior to “learning, knowing and remembering the answer.” The former treats a piece of information as an independent, context-free item, while the latter allows you to “digest” the information and understand the answer at a deeper level, to the point where it changes the types of questions you ask. Unfortunately ou…

Memorizing a set of facts in your brain has limited usefulness. Imagine memorizing the square root of the numbers from 1-100, a nice little feat but if I then ask you to give me the square root of 135 you would be helpless. A lot of facts gains you very little.

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#67

Post by donaldknuth123 »

kiba wrote: post #59
lelima wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which academic sources would you recommend on this topic? I've checked the sources from that book and they seem legit, including papers and articles[1]. Besides, the reviews of that book are very positive [2]. [1]: http://guides.skylinecollege.edu/c.php?g=279172&p=1861295 [2]: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Glad...

My recommendation is to read the academic sources, not the guy who simplified materials to an extent that things are lost in the translation leading to misrepresentation and misunderstanding. Also, always read the negative reviews. Sometime, they are bunk, but they sometime can be very informative.

Most of the negative comments are like yours, some version of: "This book is so simple anyone could have written it!"

Hardly insightful.

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#68

Post by sametmax »

lm28469 wrote: post #64
sametmax wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a balance here. Yes, I'm incredibly more productive in Python because I know the stdlib and most frameworks and tools API by heart. But it took me 10 years of practice, and my daily rate is way more than it used to be. I'll also refuse a lot of gigs outright. You want juniors to be able to work too, and you can't expect them to know the entire world. Yet they can be useful, worth the money, and a great addit…

That's if you limit the scope of the article to IT only though. If you extend the scope to your entire life it's vastly different. It's easy to feel smart because you have all the (written) knowledge of the world at the tips of your fingers at any time. I know people who constantly talk about articles they read earlier in the day, etc ... information get diluted from 10s studies, to an article, to a recap of the arti…

Actually, I find having a superficial knowledge of a lot of topics pretty useful as well. It opens perspectives, and opportunities. And there is not enough time in a day to read everything, listen to everything, watch everything, practice everything. Shortcuts are fine.

But as you say, "It's easy to feel smart". That's the real problem: you don't know what you don't know, and you should not get cocky.

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#69

Post by Sholmesy »

stakhanov wrote: post #11
cm2187 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that he has been consistently successful over a very long period, unlike, say a Paulson who one could claim got lucky in 2008.

A thought experiment: Say I have a database with 1024 e-mail addresses. I split them in two groups. I send an e-mail to 512 of them saying "tomorrow, IBM is going to go up". To the other 512, I send an e-mail saying "tomorrow, IBM is going to go down". The next day, IBM is up, and I discard from my database the 512 people to whom I've just sent an incorrect stock tip. Then I repeat. I send an e-mail to 256 people say…

Derren Brown did exactly this with horse racing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R5OWh7luL4

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#70

Post by bloopernova »

131012 wrote: post #60
vp8989 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also, practically, a massive gulf between: 1) Being vaguely aware that something exists and knowing you can Google for it. 2) Having such a deep, intuitive understanding of said thing that you can actually use knowledge of that thing to solve complex problems.

There is also different of usage of Google. There is a big difference between copy-pasting shit from stackoverflow and reading the whole documentation to understand why the hell this method was written this way. I'd say the latter is much more "buffetian".

Precisely. I work in Ops with a dash of devops thrown in. My coworkers will "document" something by copying and pasting the commands used into a confluence page and calling it done.

Which isn't very useful when you come to something 18 months later wondering "why" rather than "how". Because "why" is often more useful than "how" when you are trying to troubleshoot something.

I guess it could be condensed to wisdom over knowledge, but how do you tell people that wisdom is valuable when they clearly don't want to hear that? Wisdom takes time and effort, knowledge is a copy and paste away.

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