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This is generally my strategy and it works pretty well. It's landed me ~1000% returns in the stock market in 6 months, a new house, and a great career, essentially because I picked a professional field and put 1-2 days of effort into researching it rather than assuming that the experts would outcompete me. It's truly shocking how incompetent the average professional is.
Is this not your experience? Do you not live in a world where professionals constantly get obvious things wrong? It seems to me like most people in all fields basically just glide through life with a bare minimum of understanding necessary to do their day-to-day work, with very little understanding of even the field to which they've devoted their lives.
To be clear I'm sure there are plenty of fields that take ages to learn, and professionals much smarter than I could be given 100 years of study. But for me, that assumption--that I can gain a competitive edge over an experienced professional given only a couple of days' study of their field--has yielded spectacular results wherever I've applied it.
10x returns in 6 months has to be mostly luck, right?
For programming, my guess is you're just very smart and competent (as a ssc offshoot we select for that a bit), so you're better than most via that, and then selected a niche that's relatively underexplored but is still profitable. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be able to, in a few days, come up with a string searching or GPU matrix multiplication algorithm that significantly improves on currently used ones.
Yeah, I admit that I'm being a bit contrary by even presenting this as disagreeing with you when really I'm just making my own point here. The stock returns were probably mostly luck (though it wasn't a particularly high-risk strategy) and the programming was probably mostly a result of me being good at math. I absolutely agree I couldn't do string searching/GPU matrix multiplication, or probably even things 1/10 that hard.
I guess a better (less argumentative) way of phrasing my point would be that domain-specific knowledge is extremely important, but there are also more base-level skills (such as math, critical reasoning, charisma, etc.) that feed into many different professions. I think there are many "experts" in fields like programming, sales, psychology, etc. that lack those more base-level skills and thus can be outperformed by people who have them.
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I'm arguing against the expertise of stock market traders and programmers (the two fields I studied for a few days). I'm also arguing against expertise more generally, but programming especially is the field where just a few days' study was enough to be in, say, the 99th percentile of programmers in the (admittedly fairly obscure) language I was studying. Stock market trading too, but that can easily be ascribed to luck.
Sure, but I bet there are some doctors who consistently outperform the market too, even when doing technical analysis for companies in unrelated fields. I never claimed that the average person could outcompete experts, just that some people can and do, and that assuming that you can't is a great way to ignore $100 bills lying on the ground.
747's can generally land themselves, and I absolutely could design a bridge without reading about it at all--just perhaps not a very large or efficient one. I get your point though--there are certainly things experts are 10^10x better at than I will ever be. I just think that generally, if you are a fairly intelligent person, treating expert claims with skepticism will often yield great results.
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