But there are lots of pieces of public information that require no special abilities to access, recognize as reliable, and apply in practice, by the usual definitions of the words involved, and that lots of people would still benefit from following and don’t. Off the top of my head:
Don’t commit crime, morality aside, the rewards aren’t worth the risks.
Don’t take hard drugs like heroin, they really do screw you up.
The risk of being killed in an air crash is negligible. The risk of being killed in a road accident is anything but. Make your travel arrangements accordingly.
Don’t do crash diets, you’ll just put back all the weight as soon as you go off the diet. But do eat sensibly, keeping your weight down is a good thing.
If you’re going to have a credit card, don’t run up big debts on it.
Ration the amount of television you watch.
All straightforward advice, but millions of people suffer reduced quality of life or worse from failing to follow some of it.
It seems perfectly sensible to me to ask whether we can put together other straightforward pieces of advice that we would do well to follow but have thus far missed.
Sure, but to continue with the investment analogy, these pieces of advice would be equivalent to the advice that you should invest your money into assets with positive expected returns, and not into games of chance with negative expected gains. In other words, there exists a certain baseline level of conventional wisdom that is common knowledge, and the only people who don’t follow it are those who are exceptionally irrational, unintelligent, or suffer from poor self-control. So, the problem in those cases is how to overcome irrationality and lack of self-control, not how to acquire information, which is trivially available.
In contrast, what I meant by “getting ahead in life” is analogous to investing in an exceptionally profitable way, i.e. figuring out ways to make advantageous decisions beyond the trivially available common knowledge (possibly even contradicting it where it turns out to be inaccurate). Here, the same principle that underlies the weak EMH implies that public information will be worthless unless you’re exceptional in some way, since any broadly useful and unambiguous public information would already have become part of the universally known conventional wisdom.
To take one example mentioned in the post, when it comes to ROI on various education programs, you’ll notice that the public information is hopelessly confused and contradictory. For each source that suggests one thing, you’ll find another that claims the opposite, and also a third one that says they’re both unsubstantiated nonsense. Ultimately, if you want to make a decisions better than vague suggestions of your intuition and common knowledge—in other words, to do anything beyond merely avoiding decisions that are clearly crazy—you either have to be exceptionally capable of assessing the available information or privy to insider information.
But there are lots of pieces of public information that require no special abilities to access, recognize as reliable, and apply in practice, by the usual definitions of the words involved, and that lots of people would still benefit from following and don’t. Off the top of my head:
Don’t commit crime, morality aside, the rewards aren’t worth the risks.
Don’t take hard drugs like heroin, they really do screw you up.
The risk of being killed in an air crash is negligible. The risk of being killed in a road accident is anything but. Make your travel arrangements accordingly.
Don’t do crash diets, you’ll just put back all the weight as soon as you go off the diet. But do eat sensibly, keeping your weight down is a good thing.
If you’re going to have a credit card, don’t run up big debts on it.
Ration the amount of television you watch.
All straightforward advice, but millions of people suffer reduced quality of life or worse from failing to follow some of it.
It seems perfectly sensible to me to ask whether we can put together other straightforward pieces of advice that we would do well to follow but have thus far missed.
Sure, but to continue with the investment analogy, these pieces of advice would be equivalent to the advice that you should invest your money into assets with positive expected returns, and not into games of chance with negative expected gains. In other words, there exists a certain baseline level of conventional wisdom that is common knowledge, and the only people who don’t follow it are those who are exceptionally irrational, unintelligent, or suffer from poor self-control. So, the problem in those cases is how to overcome irrationality and lack of self-control, not how to acquire information, which is trivially available.
In contrast, what I meant by “getting ahead in life” is analogous to investing in an exceptionally profitable way, i.e. figuring out ways to make advantageous decisions beyond the trivially available common knowledge (possibly even contradicting it where it turns out to be inaccurate). Here, the same principle that underlies the weak EMH implies that public information will be worthless unless you’re exceptional in some way, since any broadly useful and unambiguous public information would already have become part of the universally known conventional wisdom.
To take one example mentioned in the post, when it comes to ROI on various education programs, you’ll notice that the public information is hopelessly confused and contradictory. For each source that suggests one thing, you’ll find another that claims the opposite, and also a third one that says they’re both unsubstantiated nonsense. Ultimately, if you want to make a decisions better than vague suggestions of your intuition and common knowledge—in other words, to do anything beyond merely avoiding decisions that are clearly crazy—you either have to be exceptionally capable of assessing the available information or privy to insider information.