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Notes -
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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