The Startling Convexity of Expertise

Strong opinions, weakly held, are a cheap call option on information.

This convexity pays off when all the information is in your head, so you can draw as many connections as possible. And those connections actually improve your retention. As you read more, more details and omissions stand out.

If you read Uber’s S-1, you get a decent understanding of the business. If you read it after you read Lyft’s, you just wonder: where are all the cohort analyses? Isn’t that the whole story? It’s a business that acquires users and gets a little more out of them each year — or, based on what Uber omitted, maybe it’s not.

Nothing in life demonstrates the same level of convexity as expertise. It really never ceases to astonish. Pick a topic, read a book, and you know something. Pick a topic, read every book ever published on it, and you’ll find yourself inside the OODA loop: you’ll start reading a chapter, know which study the author is citing, quickly figure out tha... See more

I’m not entirely sure if writing counts as “work,” but if it does I work a lot. But it’s not a be-seen-in-your-seat-at-7am kind of work; it’s a background process. Probably 10% of my topic and conclusion sentences are things I type up wearing only a towel because I wrote them in the shower. If your work is not something you find deeply engaging and... See more

And that’s for comparatively structured questions, like “What is the optimal way to convert input X into output Y?” It’s even harder for uncertain jobs, like “What should input Y be?” Was the team that designed the “like” button more productive than the team that produced Slack’s “emoji react” feature? We can argue indefinitely. Maybe the “like” ti... See more

There are studies showing that productivity per hour drops after forty hours per week, and turns negative at higher levels — but these are studies of dangerous factory jobs, or monotonous call-center work. And I don’t doubt it. If I spent a hundred hours a week on the assembly line at a munitions factory, I’d probably end up dropping a missile on m... See more