Sorry for the delay -- was reminded about this by your latest post.

For references try the bibliography in "The Genius in All of Us" by David Shenk.

"Several points…investing in its most general form is simply making decisions now that you hope result in benefits exceeding costs. We make these kinds of decisions all of the time. What route to drive home is not that different from which security to purchase from an issuer. So practice opportunities abound for investors."

This will teach decisiveness -- indeed, I learn decisiveness in life in general before I applied it to trading -- but it will not give you intuitive expertise in a specific domain.

"And I think you would agree with me that 10,000 hours is an arbitrary number, certainly not a definition, or a model, and pretty squishy data."

The point is that it is probably the right order of magnitude of expertise.

Re. analysis and creativity, I think we are talking at cross purposes here. Clearly it is useful for human beings to be creative in their analysis, and it is debatable how far that creativity belongs to system 1 or system 2. But investment decisions should be based on a model, not a gut feel: creativity is useful if it helps you build a better model.

"Also, I agree with you that people are bad at understanding financial markets, but they were also very bad at understanding the cosmos for literally millions of years. Most of the breakthroughs in scientific understanding having come only recently in terms of human history. I would argue that astrophysicists inventing a 90% plug, dark matter and dark energy, that is the method for adapting relativity to the reality is a metaphysical leap of faith."

I am not sure what you are saying here, but this is exactly the point I am making. Science is the way we come to understand things we did not understand before.

I think perhaps you are thinking of science too much through the eyes of an individual scientist. Scientists may make "intuitive leaps" (really, an organisation of facts that takes some time to brew in the mind). But a "leap" can also be a leap into a precipice -- it can be completely wrong. Our understanding of the cosmos has not progressed because we all have intuitive leaps; it has progressed because individual scientists incrementally understood more and more things, wrote down what they understood and why they understood it, and subjected their ideas to public criticism from other scientists. The important bit is all system 2.

It's the difference between learning things by experiment and learning them from a textbook. A research scientist learns by experiment; an engineer learns from a textbook -- there isn't time for him to learn everything by experiment, from scratch. One of the problems of the investment industry is that so many people are out there trying to come up with eccentric theories of their own. A good investor (and certainly a good wealth manager) needs to be like an engineer. Read the "text book" and apply it, that's my advice.

E=mc^2 is not a definition. Energy and mass are different concepts. Einstein's theory was an act of scientific modelling, not an act of grammar. Your "model" is an act of grammar. This is clear if we do a thought experiment. If I said to you, "X is a case of intuition", you might reply, "no, X is not sensory stimulus followed by interpretation and is therefore not the kind of intuition we are talking about here". If I said to Einstein, "heat is a form of energy that does not fit your theory", Einstein could not reply "oh, heat does not count as energy for the purposes of this paper". He would have to reply, "actually, that case does fit my theory".