Learning & Skill Development

Learning requires practice. We're more likely to succeed at small stakes than large stakes through accumulated experience. The more skilled you are at something, the less attention needed to perform at similar level. When you're doing lots of cognition, metacognition is hard. Get fundamentals first—don't play pickup basketball without mastering dribbling.

Knowledge can be expressed as mental structures like rules competing for strength—good rules grow stronger, bad rules weaken, and rules combine into new rules. The more you compound knowledge and acquire new information, the smarter you become. Knowledge lies in the connections. All our knowledge builds on other knowledge, creating interconnected web.

Learn by doing—the more you do, the more you learn. Wright's Law states that every doubling of cumulative production results in costs falling by roughly 20%. Experience matters more than theory. As Ray Dalio noted: "Experience taught me how invaluable it is to reflect on and write down my decision-making criteria whenever I made a decision."