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Yup, PG wrote an essay on this: "How To Be an Expert in a Changing World".

http://www.paulgraham.com/ecw.html

When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an earlier version of the world.

I absolutely believe there IS a "static world fallacy", and it gets particularly acute as you get older (and I'm not young).

A couple really obvious examples are say Apple's App Store, or Google AdWords. Huge companies have been built on those drastic changes in the environment. If you understood those things early, you had a tremendous advantage. AdWords was tremendously effective when it first came out. I know a number of people who built single-person companies on top of it.

Beware of hindsight bias: it's easy to think that those things were "obviously big", but there were plenty of other things going on at the time that you could have directed your attention toward.




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