I got a the highest paid job I could find with the skills I have that I enjoyed "well-enough". I spent less than I earned. I made mostly low risk investments (with a handful of high risk investments). I consistently did those behaviors for many decades. I also got lucky that nothing bad happened to me.
The Sierra Nevada region has a similar history of using the "checkerboard" pattern to promote railroad building. Organizations like the Trust for Public Land and the Truckee Donner Land Trust that are systematically acquiring many of these checkerboard inholdings to preserved them from future development and open them to low-impact public recreation.
That is interesting because of the Halo effect. There is a cognitive bias that if a person is right in one area, they will be right in another unrelated area.
I try to temper my tendency to believe the Halo effect with Warren Buffett's notion of the Circle of Competence; there is often a very narrow domain where any person can be significantly knowledgeable.
> A circle of competence is the subject area which matches a person's skills or expertise. The concept was developed by Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger as what they call a mental model, a codified form of business acumen, concerning the investment strategy of limiting one's financial investments in areas where an individual may have limited understanding or experience, while concentrating in areas where one has the greatest familiarity. -Wikipedia
> I try to temper my tendency to believe the Halo effect with Warren Buffett's notion of the Circle of Competence; there is often a very narrow domain where any person can be significantly knowledgeable. (commenter above)
Putting aside Buffett in particular, I'm wary of claims like "there is often a very narrow domain where any person can be significantly knowledgeable". How often? How narrow of a domain? Doesn't it depend on arbitrary definitions of what qualifies as a category? Is this a testable theory? Is it a predictive theory? What does empirical research and careful analysis show?
Putting that aside, there are useful mathematical ways to get an idea of some of the backing concepts without making assumptions about people, culture, education, etc. I'll cook one up now...
Start with 70K balls split evenly across seven colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. 1,000 show up demanding balls. So we mix them up and randomly distribute 10 balls to every person. What does the distribution tend to look like? What particulars would you tune and/or definitions would you choose to make this problem "sort of" map to something sort of like assessing the diversity of human competence across different areas?
Note the colored balls example assumes independence between colors (subjects or skills or something). But in real life, there are often causally significant links between skills. For example, general reasoning ability improves performance in a lot of other subjects.
Then a goat exploded, because I don't know how to end this comment gracefully.
I have one of those and all I can say is holy shit it works. It doesn't hook into GPS, so it's not totally self driving (at least mine isn't, there's a GitHub for their software), so I still gotta pay enough attention on the freeway to know when to exit, but after I get on the freeway, left right gas brake is all taken care of. Great for sitting in stop and go on the freeway.
It's also made me think that Waymo's a) don't need lidar, and b) don't actually need the extensive mapping that the public has been lead to believe they need. They're being overly cautious, because they know people's lives are on the line here.
You are correct that those concepts are interrelated. It works well not to get caught up in precise definitions. Instead, reflect on your current level and take the next best step.
The Lindy effect can be a useful heuristic. Something invented 30 months probably has less long-term value something that was invented 10 years ago and is being used.
The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and following tsunami shortened Earth's day by 2.68 microseconds. The energy of the tsunami alone was around 4.2E15 joules. Considering Earth's mass, radius and moment of inertia it would take ~2.9E26 joules to shorten the day by 1 minute.
One of the best things I have done is sign up for DMAchoice and optoutprescreen.com which has completely stopped junk mail for me.
reply