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?
I call those type of businesses "recursive businesses."
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.
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.
I agree here - the first few weeks after I discovered FS, I read it regularly, but after that there were quickly diminishing marginal returns.
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.
Good lord, I matched (as a reader / mailing list subscriber) all of your examples :D
That said, it’s not bad to revisit existing ideas presented in an interesting manner. These aren’t concepts that one your hear them once you can easily start using them. Inertia is an incredible force.
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.
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.
Those who know dont tell and those that tell dont know. You bet your ass if I ever find a sure fire, easily repeatable money making system Im not telling a soul.
When Shane was first starting out with FS (I picked it up around 2013, and I don't think he was around much before that.), it was great. He explained his intentions with the blog as a way of writing down what he was learning and then sharing it with others as an accountability type device. I really do miss the FS of old. It has devolved into exactly what you describe. Shane has turned it into a business. I don't blame him at all for doing so. There was obviously enough demand to do so, and I'm sure the time commitment was ever increasing.
To play devil's advocate, I think there is a relatively small overlap of 1) very successful people in finance/tech/etc and 2) people that dedicate enough time to effectively communicate ideas in a book/blog
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."
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/) 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.
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.
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.
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/. 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?)..
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
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. 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.
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.
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.”
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.
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?