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.
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.