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Notes -
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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