Member-only story
Experience Doesn’t Stack
The Myth of Collective Knowledge
We treat knowledge like so much cargo. Stack it high enough, gather enough people, and surely you’ll reach critical mass. Twenty smart people, each with a year of experience, must be just as good as one person with twenty years. Right?
But knowledge isn’t additive. It’s not clay you pile. It’s not sandbags on a levee. It doesn’t obey volume. It compounds, condenses, crystallizes. And it does so slowly, painfully, across thousands of iterations, not from reading the same book, but from living the same questions until they evolve into different ones.
One expert with twenty years doesn’t just know more facts. They see differently. They carry mental models that weren’t taught but discovered. They’ve built intuition from friction. They’ve made the same mistakes enough times to recognize them three steps before they appear. They don’t look at problems as they are but as what they become.
Meanwhile, twenty experts with a year each are still assembling the furniture. They might know the vocabulary. They may have the right graphs. But they haven’t failed enough. Haven’t reworked enough assumptions. Haven’t lived through the failure of their priors. They trade in consensus because it’s what’s safe to trade.
