202501291430 Status: #idea Tags: #learning #knowledge #skills #economics #productivity # The Completeness Hypothesis justifies broad learning In *Great Founder Theory*, Samo Burja posits that there are extreme returns to small increases in skill beyond some threshold. For example, there is a large gap in knowledge and skill between someone who knows how to program and someone who is a mediocre but competent programmer. However, their gap in economic impact from programming is relatively minor. By contrast, there is probably a smaller knowledge & skill gap between the competent programmer and the elite, 10x programmer. But the gap in economic impact is massive, with a single elite programmer potentially producing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of value. Burja proposes two theories for why this relatively small increase in skill results in huge increases in outcomes, with one of those theories being the *Completeness Hypothesis*. This hypothesis states that the value of some set of skills and knowledge can only be attained by having *all* of the pieces of the puzzle at once. For example, building 90% of a car engine does not confer 90% of the value of the full engine. Instead, it has 0 value as the car will continue to not move. You need to build the whole engine, at which point there is a step change in value from 0 to immense. Applied to knowledge work, gathering skills and knowledge about various domains gives you more pieces of the puzzle that you can potentially fit together. This can result in unique and extremely outsized returns. This works because the concepts that you should learn are often not well-defined a priori. That is, you may define or discover a totally new category of value by combining disparate skills that typically don't exist within a single person (i.e., you're putting together pieces of puzzle that other people don't even know exists). ## Related Ideas - [[Learn several high leverage skills to increase odds of satisfying the Completeness Hypothesis]] - [[The Pyramid Strategy for becoming exceptionally good]] - [[Rare skills and a strong network are required to find meaningful work]] - [[You must get to the edge of a field to identify a good mission]] --- # References [[Great Founder Theory]]