Shane Parrish has become an unlikely guru for Wall Street
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I guess at some level if this information was so valuable he'd have leveraged it into something even more powerful. Kind of like the people that, rather than (say) investing in real estate spend all their time teaching people how to invest in real estate.
Maybe the deciding factor isn't the advice, but the person?
Once you are familiar with the core mental models, most of the intellectual self-help genre (FS, James Clear, Ryan Holiday, Tim Ferris, etc.) is just rehashing the same core ideas over and over again.
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Just like your real estate example, most multi level marketers make almost all of their money from bringing new sellers into the fold rather than selling to actual customers, or people doing webinars to teach people how to do webinars, or all of the web hosting affiliate sites that teach people how to make money from being an affiliate for web hosting sites(just sign up for Bluehost first!).
I don't think Farnam Street is recursive since he's not really recommending that people do anything with the knowledge. It's just a place with a bunch of interesting ideas, though sometimes it feels like he's picked all the low hanging fruit already.
There are exceptions, Ray Dalio being a recent good example. But I think he is more the exception, not the rule.
Below is a related passage from Essentialism that touches upon this dynamic:
"Jim Collins, the author of the business classic Good to Great, was once told by Peter Drucker that he could either build a great company or build great ideas but not both. Jim chose ideas. As a result of this trade-off there are still only three full-time employees in his company, yet his ideas have reached tens of millions of people through his writing."
McKeown, Greg. Essentialism (p. 55)
I'm more intrigued by something like Online Great Books (https://onlinegreatbooks.com/) which seems like a lot of effort but would probably force me to widen my knowledge - In reality, I wish something like Online Great Books included some first principles math/science books to round it out more beyond the philosophy/literature bent.
Any experiences on Farnam street learning community, cited in this article?
The thing that makes it most valuable to me, and I'm probably in the minority, is the "curated list of knowledge" (various books, thought papers, academic pieces) and the additional exclusive emails. I constantly find interesting and thought provoking articles, speeches, interviews, etc. I think that part itself is worth the $150 a year.
My key beef is this: I think the vast majority of people who write about mental models are making a mistake in their reasoning: yes, successful practitioners succeed in part due to their mental models. But no, you can't learn their mental models from reading.
My belief is coloured by experience: while I was reading FS, I was building up a small company in Singapore, eventually hitting $4.5 million in revenue with a team of 30 by the end of three years (I managed the engineering side of things). I was struck by how little FS touched on the mental models I had to learn, and what I found useful. And then I realised that the mental models I had were really, really difficult to articulate.
I've since concluded three things:
1. The mental models that matter are tacit in nature (as opposed to explicit). You can't communicate tacit knowledge, in the same way that you can't describe how to ride a bike — you just know. I think that successful practitioners have superior tacit mental models. A good software engineer, for instance, may try to communicate what good code looks like, and what the principles of software design are, but in practice they just feel disgust when they look at bad code, and feel awe, or happiness, when they see beautiful abstractions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge
2. Humans learn by constructing knowledge from what they already know. (See: Seymour Papert). This implies that if you are not a practitioner, you cannot possibly communicate tacit knowledge, because you do not have a base of experience to build on.
3. Written mental models are useful only as guard-rails for practice. This is why Ray Dalio's Principles was so intriguing to me — here was a top level practitioner taking the time in his retirement to codify his tacit knowledge. That's incredibly rare. And it's still really hard to use — tacit knowledge is by definition extremely difficult to codify.
Like many here, I found FS's writing to be amazing when I first subscribed three years ago. It's gone rapidly downhill since; for a long time I thought I was the only one to think that. I'm slightly encouraged to see that I'm not the only one who thinks so.
I get it, the guy has to feed his family. But I do pine for the original FS, where he went deep into a few topics and worked out the secondary or tertiary implications of each mental model he describes.
2. This Shane Parrish guy seems to be a practitioner hence he’s explaining the mental models to us. Or at least he’s relaying the information from folks like Charlie Munger, but the point is we are getting useful information that originated from practitioners.
3. Yes they are useful as guard rails for practice. I wouldn’t say that’s the only thing they’re good for, but even if that were true, I’d say that provides decent value.
We can read about mental models and then put them to use. You seem to be saying that is not possible.