Byrne Hobart thinks..not always correctly but that isn’t the point. He makes you think.
“And it’s an elite school story: it opens with an anecdote about Columbia, and features quotes from professors at Princeton and UVA. UChicago, apparently, has been spared. The reason isn’t that the students are incapable of reading a book’s worth of information, but that they’re used to short stories and excerpts, not complete works. Which raises the question of how important the specific skill of completing a book really is: if they could do it, technically, do they really need to? There’s been coevolution between the economics of packaging information and the increments in which people publish their ideas; for the last few centuries, a default way to sum up an important idea is to produce 200-700 pages about it. And since earlier generations were used to thinking in those terms (before digital documents and Xerox, it was much more logistically challenging to assign excerpts from a dozen books, so you’d probably read one). So a lot of the intellectual tradition that schools are trying to pass on was first spread in book-sized chunks. It’s hard to outcompete something that has a multi-century head start.”
And yes I know it’s a personal problem, but everything that enters the frontal orbital socket somehow clicks some things that reference investing. As does this.
Our mantra is usually something about “do your own work” and “refer to the original document, not a summary complied by another human OR a technology.” But history suggests that the possibility of being wrong is always lurking. There is always a balance between scanning the world an inch deep using all technology available vs deep diving into X idea. Neither is self sufficiency because you cannot spend a year on 4 ideas, nor can you flit like a drunken butterfly on the bright light d’jure. You need to fly at 30,000 feet looking for food below and oscillate up and down in focus, before deciding to deep dive. That is obviously the art vs the science.
I recognize one of my few abilities is exceptional visual intake and retention, which is why I hate the pace of podcasts. But is it somewhat scary to suggest that there is a new breed of humanis investus which simply cannot or will not read longform? Scanning 10k’s might be one thing, but not actually seeing “value” in reading longform on any topic is….what? And forgetting investing for a moment – what about the rest of the damn world?
Signed – older and cranky reader.
