Except that all the meaningful combinations are already being competed on, while all the meaningless combinations are not.
The amount of meaningful combinations is not sn, but much lower. This website lists 12.000 career paths. I’d wager that the true number is not more than an order of magnitude away from it. If we take a (totally arbitrary) upper bound guess of 100.000 career paths, that means to be world class you still have to compete with 80.000 people.
Of course you can try and invent a new meaningful combination of skills, but that’s just another skill combination, and it’s one that a lot of people are already competing on.
There are other points in support of your counter argument too. Defining the boundaries of a “skill” is arbitrary. Are we comparing ourselves to professionals or laypeople, and what counts as a useful level of achievement?
This same objection comes up on this website every time this argument gets made. You can find it in some of johnswentworth’s posts. The motion of the argument is always from the “combinations of skills makes you world-class” → “the good ones are all taken,” not the other way around.
The central point, unstated here, is that we need to find ways of sparking our imagination to see how we can get beyond imitation and into innovation.
It’s hard to go from a combination of very general skills (cooking, tractor repair, math, stand up comedy, arctic exploration) to a concrete idea for a job, invention, or research project.
Instead, focusing on the most important, tractable ideas pushes people to gain new skills outside their specialty. Those who hyper-specialize limit themselves to projects that are tractable within their current skillset. Those who are willing to learn in an open-ended way to pursue the most interesting goals acquire targeted micro-skills outside their main discipline.
This suggests an association between having a variety of skills and significant, world-class achievement. But it’s not that achievement will consistently follow from arbitrary skill combinations, but rather that the remaining available achievements can only be unlocked by mastering previously unknown skill combinations.
There’s an unstated call to action here. If you’re choosing between a moderately interesting project that’s fully within your skillset, and a very interesting one that requires learning some far-afield skills, choose the latter.
The central point, unstated here, is that we need to find ways of sparking our imagination to see how we can get beyond imitation and into innovation.
My personal approach is to deliberately master a variety of orthogonal skills and wait for my unconscious to ask “Why doesn’t someone do x?” because good cross-disciplinary ideas are often obvious to specialists and invisible to everyone else.
If you’re a database expert, don’t build a chat app for teenagers (unless you’re also a teenager). Maybe it’s a good idea, but you can’t trust your judgment about that, so ignore it. There have to be other ideas that involve databases, and whose quality you can judge. Do you find it hard to come up with good ideas involving databases? That’s because your expertise raises your standards. Your ideas about chat apps are just as bad, but you’re giving yourself a Dunning-Kruger pass in that domain.
Exactly. Really, the title should be “Six specializations makes you world-class at a combination of skills that is probably completely useless.” Really, productivity is a function of your skills. The fact that you are “world class” in a random combination of skills is only interesting if people are systematically under-estimating the degree to which random skills can be usefully combined. If there are reasons to believe that, then I would be interested in reading about it.
Another interpretation of that website would conclude S=12,000 (though I think just using the big categories S=1,388 works better). Thank you for the link. I originally thought S=100 might be too high but now I feel it might be too low.
Looking for pre-existing career paths is doing the opposite of what my article recommends because pre-existing career paths are, by definition, domains with competition. To follow the advice in this article, you usually must discover or “invent a new meaningful combination of skills”.
Many meaningful combinations are not being competed on. For example, nobody is writing good Harry Potter Rationalist fanfiction right now and that’s just n=2 (fiction writing and rationalism).
Maybe there are better ways to come to agreement on the feasibility of discovery. Perhaps we should look at the success rate of startups? Do you have other ideas?
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.
I base my estimate of the feasibility of discovery on my personal experience of startup (and non-startup) entrepreneurship. The number of worthwhile projects I can pursue is way higher than the number of projects I have time to pursue. For example, I coded and deployed an ML-based language learning app that I use for self-study but I don’t open it up to the public because I’m working on more important projects.
Of course you can try and invent a new meaningful combination of skills, but that’s just another skill combination, and it’s one that a lot of people are already competing on.
Caveat: this may not be very true (outside not-completely-incompetent entrepreneurship).
Except that all the meaningful combinations are already being competed on, while all the meaningless combinations are not.
The amount of meaningful combinations is not sn, but much lower. This website lists 12.000 career paths. I’d wager that the true number is not more than an order of magnitude away from it. If we take a (totally arbitrary) upper bound guess of 100.000 career paths, that means to be world class you still have to compete with 80.000 people.
Of course you can try and invent a new meaningful combination of skills, but that’s just another skill combination, and it’s one that a lot of people are already competing on.
There are other points in support of your counter argument too. Defining the boundaries of a “skill” is arbitrary. Are we comparing ourselves to professionals or laypeople, and what counts as a useful level of achievement?
This same objection comes up on this website every time this argument gets made. You can find it in some of johnswentworth’s posts. The motion of the argument is always from the “combinations of skills makes you world-class” → “the good ones are all taken,” not the other way around.
The central point, unstated here, is that we need to find ways of sparking our imagination to see how we can get beyond imitation and into innovation.
It’s hard to go from a combination of very general skills (cooking, tractor repair, math, stand up comedy, arctic exploration) to a concrete idea for a job, invention, or research project.
Instead, focusing on the most important, tractable ideas pushes people to gain new skills outside their specialty. Those who hyper-specialize limit themselves to projects that are tractable within their current skillset. Those who are willing to learn in an open-ended way to pursue the most interesting goals acquire targeted micro-skills outside their main discipline.
This suggests an association between having a variety of skills and significant, world-class achievement. But it’s not that achievement will consistently follow from arbitrary skill combinations, but rather that the remaining available achievements can only be unlocked by mastering previously unknown skill combinations.
There’s an unstated call to action here. If you’re choosing between a moderately interesting project that’s fully within your skillset, and a very interesting one that requires learning some far-afield skills, choose the latter.
My personal approach is to deliberately master a variety of orthogonal skills and wait for my unconscious to ask “Why doesn’t someone do x?” because good cross-disciplinary ideas are often obvious to specialists and invisible to everyone else.
Exactly. Really, the title should be “Six specializations makes you world-class at a combination of skills that is probably completely useless.” Really, productivity is a function of your skills. The fact that you are “world class” in a random combination of skills is only interesting if people are systematically under-estimating the degree to which random skills can be usefully combined. If there are reasons to believe that, then I would be interested in reading about it.
Another interpretation of that website would conclude S=12,000 (though I think just using the big categories S=1,388 works better). Thank you for the link. I originally thought S=100 might be too high but now I feel it might be too low.
Looking for pre-existing career paths is doing the opposite of what my article recommends because pre-existing career paths are, by definition, domains with competition. To follow the advice in this article, you usually must discover or “invent a new meaningful combination of skills”.
Many meaningful combinations are not being competed on. For example, nobody is writing good Harry Potter Rationalist fanfiction right now and that’s just n=2 (fiction writing and rationalism).
Our double crux seems to be about the feasibility of finding new combinations that are meaningful.
Using previously discovered combinations as examples doesn’t count, because discovery is easy in hindsight.
Could you come up with a bunch of novel combinations, right here and now, that sound like they might be useful to the world at large?
I could, but that would be a recipe for ideas that sound good but are actually bad.
Maybe there are better ways to come to agreement on the feasibility of discovery. Perhaps we should look at the success rate of startups? Do you have other ideas?
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.
I base my estimate of the feasibility of discovery on my personal experience of startup (and non-startup) entrepreneurship. The number of worthwhile projects I can pursue is way higher than the number of projects I have time to pursue. For example, I coded and deployed an ML-based language learning app that I use for self-study but I don’t open it up to the public because I’m working on more important projects.
I think you meant 80,000 people.
thanks, fixed it