The silent majority of experts (2012)
Yep. On a related note, when I was younger, I searched for advice from experts for how to develop expertise in studying and productivity on Reddit. It led to lots of highly-upvoted advice (including stuff like supplements, largely with few real benefits besides placebo), popular blogs by influencers (like Scott Young), and popular self-help books.<p>However, the actual experts I knew in high school who later went on to great institutions like MIT or applied and got into extremely competitive investment banks didn&#x27;t browse the internet very much, or relied on supplements and these books.<p>Similar to the ideas expressed in the submitted article, these people didn&#x27;t spend time online reading blogs and Reddit, or blogging&#x2F;self-promoting themselves. They generally were involved in a sport (track and field or squash), spent little time online, and spent a lot of time using a lot of paper studying.<p>They also were careful who they associated with as friends (they hung out with studious people). Less in one&#x27;s control, their parents were financially successful or were in competitive positions (e.g. were professors or physicians), so they may have learned these strategies from them, versus inventing them independently.<p>Long story short: there is absolutely a culture of improvement that is primarily offline and less visible, because people either don&#x27;t record it, or people do record it and it doesn&#x27;t get upvoted or ranked highly on Google searches. Examples of recorded good advice appeared on HN recently, shared by computer scientist Donald Knuth who is also usually offline: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31482116" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31482116</a>