Extracting Information.
How to extract quality data.
yours truly.
There is a hierarchy of how to extract data, from the top-of-funnel to the intrinsic high quality alpha. It is not necessary to repeat actions unnecessarily. The goal is to recognize which minds are the smartest and to aggregate from the highest information density. Oddly enough, it works for things like Culture and music as well. [Art]
The beginning layer, substrata has all the shit info. The click bait and weakest understandings, the mid takes and the most diluted understanding, if any at all. These are where the sheep get taken advantage of. These are headlines and loud noises, reactions, in which you can use to first see that something is there. AI-is-here article titles, 10 ways to etc. etc. etc. 99.9% of the time these will be trash. But it will signal something exists.
Black Metal Ramen Commercial.
If you want to learn about the latest, you have to first see these horrible posts and buzzfeed. The noise tells you that a movement is starting. After you establish a network of early-adopters and researchers, you will eventually hear about it even before the headliners do. But at first you must hear the noise. Sometimes it is a mix. [The “early adopters” can get comfortable and you must find a new set of early adopters to stay on the cutting edge. But often times you can find entities who are always on the cutting edge, for a long time. But they are very rare. Everyone is blind in some way.]
So we see the noise and we know there is a movement starting. This is good for financial traders, as they want to place bets on things before everyone else does. [doing it even earlier as per the above paragraph is even better.] But this is important for everyone. To stay on the pulse is to absorb the new-thing fast, be advantageous fast. Increases quality of the brand and helps you to be a known source of precious espionage, idea. This subconsciously makes your products or services signal that you are putting more thought and quality into your infra. [you don’t always have to follow a trend, simply research it.]
Vitalik Buterin, Mila Kunis, and Ashton Kutcher
Then we look for the next level.
These are the better-than-average, but cheesy posters and entities. They usually are ex-industry ppl who wised up and came to the underground. Ex-finance heads who now work in crypto, or silicon valley VCs who now are getting grittier at ML/AI. Bigger, cheesy commercial Artists, actors, who suddenly want to be cooler. They will use broad strokes as painters, have no fine detail but are very useful in macro and broad direction and advice. A very rare few will be able to understand both underground and macro info. But it is possible, of a template.
Now we get to the last two levels.
First we have the alpha yes-men. The nerds who supported LK-99 right away, who jumped on AI before it was cool, who listen to the underground bands and knew about Fred Again before he got hot, the early 100 gecs geeks, etc. Cypherpunks. Hardcore anime know-it-alls. I could go on forever.
They don’t have the courage to be the next creator of AKIRA [yet] but they [might] have very good research. [Some might be really fucking good, most will be premium mediocre or mid.] I was in this stage for a long time, before I starting building the brand(s) I am in now. I’d follow and research the best of the best, being a curator of sorts, while also making my own music or artistic material, but it was difficult to figure out how to succeed financially, although I did make some money, but it wasn’t enough for me. What I did end up doing was finding financial information and entities away from the creative scene, who then helped me to figure out the business end of things, and financial research. This was a long climb. [More on that later, in another article.]
Balance: Unlimited. An anime series about a detective who has “unlimited” funding.
The last level is the top level research and help. Either they are the rare few who have actually done Big Business and somehow are dedicated to explaining, with some incentive, or you pay for their information, which still might be shit, or you find ppl like Charlie Munger and you extract as much information that you can in pieces as they leak info. You can find the ones who are building or running businesses in real time and extract every piece of data they leak, usually from social media.
It is amazing how much hidden info gets leaked on social, things that ppl would never even say to the ppl in their own office or friends. You can get a lot of insights and hints to information from leaked info on social, although most of the data will be in fragments, or cryptic, leading you to further insights. A very rare few will pass on detailed information directly, and no matter what, you will have to aggregate your own hypothesis from disparate sources, because everyone, no matter how rich or Big, is blind. Everyone is blind.
Charlie Munger thought Bitcoin was stupid, for example. Steve Jobs wore the same shirt everyday, etc. No one is good at everything. Bitcoin ppl laugh at Charlie and Charlie laughs at crypto ppl’s business investing sense. Elon Musk tried to be a DJ, I wouldn’t go to him for any info on DJing. This is why good researchers and research itself is very rare. Even big boys don’t have all the info, as the ego [often] prevents the mind from learning new or different things. Plus there is a physical limit.
Soon there will be a smarter, newer type of rockstar, that learns more and more as we evolve within our species. Antifragility.
When you begin to realize the limitations of the cyberbrain, one can accelerate the mission. Aggregate and find the most condensed version of high quality data.
Go fucking win.
[ps: realize the banner is from 2023. Will fix it.]