
Shane Parrish has become an unlikely guru for Wall Street - yarapavan
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/11/business/intelligence-expert-wall-street.html
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gadders
Farnham Street is an entertaining read, but the problem I have with it is that
owner is compiling all this wisdom, these great techniques for life, and he's
er, running a website about compiling wisdom and great techniques for life.

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?

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cbron
I read FS regularly for months, but eventually had to give up on it because it
started to feel like one big regurgitated self-help book. Maybe he really
wants to talk to interesting people and this is his way of doing it, but to me
it seems like mostly just noise.

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noufalibrahim
Have you come across any blog or podcast which offered useful advice that
didn't finally start feeling this way? Even something as well researched as
Brain pickings seems to degenerate into repetitive fluff after a while.

~~~
cbron
Not in the "think/work smarter" genre. Taking in diverse content, like reading
medium posts all by different authors, can inject new ideas. But it seems this
genre has a limit to how much useful info there really is.

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jakarta
I could never get into Farnam Street because it just seemed like appropriating
Charlie Munger's mental models to sell self-help services.

I'm more intrigued by something like Online Great Books
([https://onlinegreatbooks.com/](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.

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gglitch
I haven’t heard of the business you linked to, but the great books program
definitely includes math. That’s how I did the Elements and it was
transformative.

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JamesClear99
"Reading is a way to consume people’s experiences, to learn something timeless
and then apply it to your life.”

Any experiences on Farnam street learning community, cited in this article?

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tguedes
The forum can be quite dead at times, if you check it once a week, there will
always be something interesting to read/discussion posts to participate in.
Just that itself, I would not say is worth the $150 a year (he does not do
monthly). I have not attended any of the events or meetups, found a mentor, or
participated in the book club, so I can't comment on that stuff.

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.

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rluhar
I am a member of the learning community. I found great value in the
transcripts of the Knowledge Project podcasts. The podcast is free but the
transcripts are available to the learning community. My favourite recent
podcast was with Tobi Lutke (CEO of Shopify) - [https://fs.blog/tobi-
lutke/](https://fs.blog/tobi-lutke/). Other podcasts that were super
interesting were with Robert Greene, Naval Ravikant and Venkatesh Rao. The
forum itself is interesting - there is a regular reading group which I really
enjoy as well. It is expensive, but I think it is worth it (or am I simply a
victim of the sunk cost fallacy?)..

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shadowsun7
I wrote a longish post criticising Farnam Street's (and others) called the
mental model fallacy.[1]

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](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.

[1] [https://commoncog.com/blog/the-mental-model-
fallacy/](https://commoncog.com/blog/the-mental-model-fallacy/)

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MilanoCookie
1\. For trying to explain riding a bike, that just shows the difficulty in
describing how to coordinate and move your body parts. A software engineer can
clearly explain why the code looks good, which is then clearly understood by
anyone who has basic technical understanding. Implying this is some abstract
phenomenon that you “just feel” sounds like witchcraft.

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.

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shadowsun7
Hey, thanks for the comment! You should probably read the full post, though,
as it pre-emptively deals with all three observations you've raised.

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MilanoCookie
Your pre-emptive details may have been valid but your conclusions have been
refuted.

We can read about mental models and then put them to use. You seem to be
saying that is not possible.

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shadowsun7
Are you sure that’s what I’m saying?

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MilanoCookie
Your conclusions are entirely false. It’s obvious that any human can explain
to another human how their thought process works and what their reasoning
behind decisions were. You’re just wrong, and you spent a lot of time writing
up conclusions that don’t make sense.

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pibefision
The podcast is really good. I follow him there using Google Podcast. Highly
recommended.

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majestik
If this guy were Russian there would be stories about the KGB infiltrating
Wall St, but because he’s Canadian he’s just running a “knowledge community.”

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ceph_
Yes, and that would be fully warranted. One is a criminal organization that
kills dissidents and is entrenched in corruption. The other is the Canadian
government.

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oh_sigh
So are all Russians suspect in your book?

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ceph_
Citizens are not their government. I think that should be clear to anyone that
isn't trying to stoke nationalist ideologies.

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oh_sigh
Then how is your comment relevant? OP only said if this guy was Russian, he
would be treated differently.

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hahawhat222
Sounds like someone repackaged the Less Wrong sequences for finance guys

