Experts Have It Easy

Something that’s painfully understudied is how experts are more efficient than novices while achieving better results. I say understudied and not unstudied, because it’s common knowledge that charging people for their time results in experts being paid less since they work faster, which is why experts charge more for their time.

This effect is understudied in the impact it has on novices entering a field. A Novice will start out being woefully inefficient, putting in incredible amounts of effort and running through all number of mental hoops in order to maintain the growing pile of unmaintainable abstractions they’ve developed. An expert doesn’t have to jump through these hoops. They can more clearly see the actual problem at hand and will more efficiently put their time and effort towards making progress against the problem. In contrast, novices will spend more time battling problems they created for themselves. Let’s explore this idea by looking at two characters entrapped in a maze, and how they go about escaping.
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