Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Compounding Knowledge

fs.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 181 posts

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#51

Post by NLips »

thesausageking wrote: post #39

If his knowledge were compounding, we'd expect his performance to getting over time, not worse. But that's the opposite of what happened. He's underperformed the S&P 500 over the last 10 years. And it's been decades since he's been able to match the great returns he had very early in his career which he built his reputation on.

I don't believe that's true. Looking at historic performance of BRK-A, it's out-performed the S&P 500 betwen pretty much any starting point and right now. The only exceptions I can see are midway through the '08-'09 financial crisis, where at times the S&P had sunken faster than BRK-A, leading to having a slightly larger recovery since.

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#52

Post by ovi256 »

collyw wrote: post #28
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.

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

In cutting-edge domains, a lot of that won't be written down, so ungooglable by definition.

For example, in deep learning research, good labs were using good initialization functions before somebody bothered to write a research paper explaining why it was good idea. If you didn't work in one of those good labs and so were never told to do that, you would just struggle and say "yeah these deep nets suck they don't even converge".

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#53

Post by cerebellum42 »

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…

Worth mentioning that looking things up vs. learning and then knowing everything isn't a binary choice, there are degrees.

Just as an example, there is a difference between knowing roughly what to google and then looking up everything you need to know for a task, and knowing exactly what you want to do and googling to look up the execution details which you don't remember.

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#54

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Bucephalus355 wrote: post #45

“Hard to become an expert. Easy to be an expert.” I spent many years learning how to do cloud architecture. Now I can briefly look at AWS documentation for new services out of the corner of my eye and know all I need to for the next 6 months. Yet the other day I opened a book on Java, which I haven’t studied since college, and literally had no idea what in the world I was reading.

Back in the day (I'm not THAT old but still) I had the same with Javadoc, two chapters of the Java text book and the rest I could quickly google.

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#55

Post by bgroat »

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.

However, Buffett calculated that there weren't enough investors for his success to be a factor of random distribution, plus there were 2 dozen others who followed a similar strategy who also consistently generate alpha

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#56

Post by chosenbreed37 »

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…

> 4. WB probably made extreme lifestyle sacrifices to have more digits in his bank account and more troubles/reports to read everyday.

Possibly...I think those are just personal preferences. Apparently he rather likes his old house in the middle of nowhere. Apparently he prefers burgers and coca-cola to Michelin star restaurants with rare vintages. He seems to actually enjoy reading and buying up companies. He seems to be one of those few people who happened to get into a trade/profession that they had and aptitude for and enjoy.

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#57

Post by collyw »

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.

Ok, that's true when you are in a new domain and don't know the terminology well enough to google effectively.

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#58

Post by bgroat »

dna_polymerase wrote: post #47

(Slightly Off-Topic) Question to those who subscribe to Farnam Street: Would you recommend it? Does it add value to your life?

I loved it for about 18 months than I figured that I'd learned everything I needed from it.

The quality remained stellar, I just didn't need it anymore

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#59

Post by kiba »

lelima wrote: post #50
kiba wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't recommend any books by Malcolm Gladwell. He oversimplified things for the sake of telling stories. If you want to learn rigorously, better look toward academic sources.

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.

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#60

Post by 131012 »

vp8989 wrote: post #16
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 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".

Post reply on HN