Jared Fielding

Investor, traveler, avid life style systems designer, fitness nerd, self quantifier, politico, snowboarder

[CommunityNotesFTW @CNsFTW]

Perspective and objectivity are critical to truth, IF truth is what you seek.

[Homeland Security @DHSgov]

5 out of the 6 arrests last night were people from OUTSIDE of New Jersey.

There is a coordinated campaign of violence against our @ICEgov law enforcement.

Our ICE law enforcement  officers are facing an 8,000% increase in death threats and a 1,300% increase in assaults against them.

This violence against law enforcement must end.

[Tim Ferriss @tferriss]

Hallucinatives (n.)
    The first generations to take AI/LLM answers as truth without cross-checking.

[Adam Carolla @adamcarolla]

True

[Defiant L’s @DefiantLs]

Never gets old

[Jared Fielding @jaredfielding]

Fascinating. If you could afford this the edge you could give a human could be insane. Especially in this age.

[Gene Smith @GeneSmi96946389]

A friend of mine had her embryos screened by Herasight and they found one with an IQ score in the 99.99th percentile

[Wesley Yang @wesyang]

The variance between embryos is amazing.
Think about the ramifications of choosing the IQ outlier, how it will condition that child's existence, and subtly recast her as a consumer product, while also advantaging her greatly.

The propagation of this technology means forgoing optimization becomes a choice.

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow fired the company’s entire HR team because they were “creating problems that didn’t exist.”

[The Rabbit Hole @TheRabbitHole]

“It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.”

— George Orwell

[The Rabbit Hole @TheRabbitHole]

Socialists would be in a lot of trouble without the fruits of Capitalism to subsidize their delusions and illiteracy.

[Defiant L’s @DefiantLs]

I do

[Jared Fielding @jaredfielding]

Very much fits with my personal life experience

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Hungarian psychologist raised three daughters to prove that any child could become a chess grandmaster through early specialization. He succeeded. Two of them became grandmasters. One became the greatest female chess player who ever lived.

Then a sports scientist looked at the data and found something nobody wanted to hear.

His name is David Epstein. The book is called "Range."

The Polgar experiment is one of the most famous case studies in the history of deliberate practice. Laszlo Polgar wrote a book before his daughters were even born arguing that geniuses are made, not born. He homeschooled all three girls in chess from age four. By their teens, Susan, Sofia, and Judit were dominating tournaments against grown men. Judit became the youngest grandmaster in history at the time, breaking Bobby Fischer's record. The story became the gospel of early specialization. Pick a domain young, drill it hard, and you can manufacture excellence.

Epstein opens his book by telling that story honestly and then quietly demolishing the conclusion most people drew from it.

Chess works that way. Most things do not.

Here is the distinction that took him four years of research to articulate, and that almost nobody who quotes the 10,000 hour rule has ever read.

There are two kinds of environments in which humans develop expertise. Psychologists call them kind and wicked. A kind environment has clear rules, immediate feedback, and patterns that repeat reliably. Chess is the cleanest example. Every game ends with a winner and a loser. Every move is recorded. The board never changes shape. The pieces never invent new ways to move. A child who plays ten thousand games will see most of the patterns that exist in the game, and pattern recognition is exactly what chess mastery is built on.

A wicked environment is the opposite. Feedback is delayed or misleading. Rules shift. The patterns that worked yesterday may be exactly the wrong patterns to apply tomorrow. Most of the real world looks like this. Medicine is wicked. Investing is wicked. Building a company is wicked. Scientific research is wicked. Almost every job that involves a complex changing system with humans in it is wicked.

The Polgar sisters trained in the kindest environment any human can train in. Their success was real and the method was correct. The mistake was generalizing the method to fields where the underlying structure of the environment is completely different.

Epstein's research is what made the implication impossible to ignore.

He looked at the careers of elite athletes outside of chess and golf and found that the pattern was almost the inverse of what people assumed. The athletes who reached the very top of their sports were overwhelmingly people who had played multiple sports as children, specialized late, and often switched disciplines well into their teens. Roger Federer played squash, badminton, basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, and soccer before tennis became his focus. The kids who specialized in tennis at age six and trained year-round for a decade mostly burned out, got injured, or topped out at lower levels of the sport.

The same pattern showed up everywhere he looked outside of kind environments. Inventors with the most patents had worked in multiple unrelated fields before their breakthrough work. Comic book creators with the longest careers had drawn for the most different genres before settling. Scientists who won Nobel Prizes were dramatically more likely than their peers to be serious amateur musicians, painters, sculptors, or writers.

The skill that mattered in wicked environments was not depth in one pattern. It was the ability to recognize when a pattern from one domain applied unexpectedly in another. That kind of thinking cannot be built by drilling a single subject. It can only be built by accumulating mental models from many subjects and learning to move between them.

The deeper finding is the one that should change how you think about your own career.

Specialists in wicked environments often get worse with experience, not better. Epstein cites studies of doctors, financial analysts, intelligence officers, and forecasters showing that years of experience in a narrow domain frequently produce more confident judgments without producing more accurate ones. The expert builds elaborate mental models that feel comprehensive and turn out to be increasingly disconnected from the actual structure of the problem. They stop noticing what does not fit their framework. They mistake fluency for understanding.

Generalists do better in wicked domains for a reason that sounds almost mystical until you understand the mechanism. They have less invested in any single mental model, so they abandon broken models faster. They are used to being a beginner, so they are not threatened by the discomfort of not knowing. They have seen enough different domains that they can usually find an analogy from one field that unlocks a problem in another. The technical name for this is analogical thinking, and the research on it is one of the most underrated bodies of work in cognitive science.

The single most useful sentence in the entire book is the one Epstein puts almost as a throwaway.

Match quality matters more than head start.

A person who tries six different fields in their twenties and finds the one that genuinely fits them will outperform a person who picked one field at fourteen and stuck to it on willpower alone. The lost years were not lost. They were the search process that produced the match. Every field they walked away from taught them something they later imported into the field they finally chose.

The reason this is so hard to accept is cultural, not empirical. We tell children to pick a path early. We reward the prodigy who knew at six. We treat the late bloomer as someone who failed to launch on time, when the data suggests they were running an entirely different and often more effective optimization process underneath.

The Polgar sisters were not wrong. The conclusion the world drew from them was.

If your environment is genuinely kind, specialize early and drill hard. If it is wicked, and almost every interesting human problem is, then the people who win are the ones who refused to specialize until they had seen enough to know what was actually worth specializing in.

You are not behind. You were running the right experiment all along.

[Jared Fielding @jaredfielding]

@libsoftiktok Where at?

[End Wokeness @EndWokeness]

State debt, per resident (2026):

Massachusetts: $11,507
Connecticut: $10,793
New York: $7,335
Florida: $1,422

It's almost as if… policies matter

[Jared Fielding @jaredfielding]

I wonder if this is why white liberal women are sure no one else worked that hard to get what they are. So many weren't poor growing up and married someone who made them rich.

[Bad Hombre @Badhombre]

Classic projection from Jessica Tarlov. She was born into immense wealth. She grew up in a $27 million home at 19 Jay Street in Tribeca. Mommy and daddy paid for her schooling at Bryn Mawr College and then paid for her to live and study in London.

She’s married to a millionaire hedge fund manager and landed her gig as the token airhead on FOX thanks to her friendship with Democrat pollster Douglas Schoen.

Jessica has never built or done anything on her own. To feel better about herself she says no one else has either.

[Clay Travis @ClayTravis]

A team of 14 year old boys beat the University of Washington women’s soccer team that finished in the top 8 of women’s college soccer. The WNBA champs never responded to my offer of $1 million if they could beat a boy’s high school state title team: https://t.co/2josQbajv9

[Jared Fielding @jaredfielding]

Said it before. UK is captured. Pure and simple. Fallen. It is a meaningless country now.

[Defiant L’s @DefiantLs]

"Why am I in cuffs because of something he shared, then I shared?"

"Because someone has been caused anxiety based upon your social media post. That's why you've been arrested."

This right here should scare the living sh*t out of you. These two sentences alone. We have a lot of work to do.

[Adam Carolla @adamcarolla]

I remember this

[Clifford Asness @CliffordAsness]

In Atlas Shrugged they passed laws to stop businessmen from quitting. Just saying.