Previously in series:  Unteachable Excellence
Followup to:  Artificial Addition

The literary industry that I called "excellence pornography" isn't very good at what it does.  But it is failing at a very important job.  When you consider the net benefit to civilization of Warren Buffett's superstar skills, versus the less glamorous but more communicable trick of "reinvest wealth to create more wealth" - there's hardly any comparison.  You can see how much it would matter, if you could figure out how to communicate just one more skill that used to be a secret sauce.  Not the pornographic promise of consuming the entire soul of a superstar.  Just figuring out how to reliably teach one more thing, even if it wasn't everything...

What makes a success hard to duplicate?

Naked statistical chance is always incommunicable.  No matter what you say about your historical luck, you can't teach someone else to have it.  The arts of seizing opportunity, and exposing yourself to positive randomness, are commonly underestimated; I've seen people stopped in their tracks by "bad luck" that a Silicon Valley entrepreneur would drive over like a steamroller flattening speed bumps...  Even so, there is still an element of genuine chance left over.

Einstein's superstardom depended on his genetics that gave him the potential to learn his skills.  If a skill relies on having that much brainpower, you can't teach it to most people... Though if the potential is one-in-a-million, then six thousand Einsteins around the world would be an improvement.  (And if we're going to be really creative, who says genes are incommunicable?  It just takes more advanced technology than a blackboard, that's all.)

So when we factor out the genuinely unteachable - what's left?  Where you can you push the border?  What is it that might be possible to teach - albeit perhaps very difficult - and isn't being taught?

I was once told that half of Nobel laureates were the students of other Nobel laureates.  This source seems to assert 155 out of 503.  (Interestingly, the same source says that the number of Nobel laureates with Nobel "grandparents" (teachers of teachers) is just 60.)  Even after discounting for cherry-picking of students and political pull, this suggests to me that you can learn things by apprenticeship - close supervision, free-form discussion, ongoing error correction over a long period of time - that no Nobel laureate has yet succeeding in putting into any of their many books.

What is it that the students of Nobel laureates learn, but can't put into words?