From lsusr’s response to my comment above, I think they’re saying that learning new skills makes you more able to recognize the right problems to solve, as well as to execute on potential solutions.
So there is a prediction here. Learning a new skill will be more positively correlated with identifying better ideas than they had before, as compared with an equal investment of time deepening a skill they already possessed.
How can we operationalize this?
One way is that we could create a dataset of startup founders. We’d look at their age and the number of previous companies they’d founded or worked for. Optimally, we’d find a way to quantify how different from each other these companies were.
lsusr’s framework might predict that, controlling for age, founders who’d worked for a greater number and diversity of companies would achieve greater personal wealth than those who’d worked for a smaller number and less diverse range of companies.
Because this is a loose heuristic, with a solid argument in both directions, I think we should insist on careful data-gathering in a carefully operationalized manner before we accept anything as more substantial evidence than the plausibility-supporting anecdotes we already have access to here.
From lsusr’s response to my comment above, I think they’re saying that learning new skills makes you more able to recognize the right problems to solve, as well as to execute on potential solutions.
So there is a prediction here. Learning a new skill will be more positively correlated with identifying better ideas than they had before, as compared with an equal investment of time deepening a skill they already possessed.
How can we operationalize this?
One way is that we could create a dataset of startup founders. We’d look at their age and the number of previous companies they’d founded or worked for. Optimally, we’d find a way to quantify how different from each other these companies were.
lsusr’s framework might predict that, controlling for age, founders who’d worked for a greater number and diversity of companies would achieve greater personal wealth than those who’d worked for a smaller number and less diverse range of companies.
Because this is a loose heuristic, with a solid argument in both directions, I think we should insist on careful data-gathering in a carefully operationalized manner before we accept anything as more substantial evidence than the plausibility-supporting anecdotes we already have access to here.