Caplan is correct here. There’s no ‘far transfer’ of the sort which might even slightly resemble ‘get a 5% discount on all future fields you study’. (Not that we see anyone who exhibits such an ‘educational singularity’ in practice, anyway.) At best there might be a sort of meta-study-skill which gives a one-off ‘far transfer’ effect, like learning how to use search engines or spaced repetition, but it’s quickly exhausted and of course just one doesn’t give any singularity-esque effect.
A more plausible model would be one with pure near-transfer: every field has a few adjacent fields which give a say 5% near-transfer. So one could learn physics/chemistry/biology, for example, in 2.9x the time of 3 individuals learning the 3 fields separately at 3x the time.
Caplan is correct here. There’s no ‘far transfer’ of the sort which might even slightly resemble ‘get a 5% discount on all future fields you study’. (Not that we see anyone who exhibits such an ‘educational singularity’ in practice, anyway.) At best there might be a sort of meta-study-skill which gives a one-off ‘far transfer’ effect, like learning how to use search engines or spaced repetition, but it’s quickly exhausted and of course just one doesn’t give any singularity-esque effect.
A more plausible model would be one with pure near-transfer: every field has a few adjacent fields which give a say 5% near-transfer. So one could learn physics/chemistry/biology, for example, in 2.9x the time of 3 individuals learning the 3 fields separately at 3x the time.