I am beginning to suspect that it is surprisingly common for intelligent, competent adults to somehow make it through the world for a few decades while missing some ordinary skill, like mailing a physical letter, folding a fitted sheet, depositing a check, or reading a bus schedule. Since these tasks are often presented atomically - or, worse, embedded implicitly into other instructions - and it is often possible to get around the need for them, this ignorance is not self-correcting. One can Google "how to deposit a check" and similar phrases, but the sorts of instructions that crop up are often misleading, rely on entangled and potentially similarly-deficient knowledge to be understandable, or are not so much instructions as they are tips and tricks and warnings for people who already know the basic procedure. Asking other people is more effective because they can respond to requests for clarification (and physically pointing at stuff is useful too), but embarrassing, since lacking these skills as an adult is stigmatized. (They are rarely even considered skills by people who have had them for a while.)
This seems like a bad situation. And - if I am correct and gaps like these are common - then it is something of a collective action problem to handle gap-filling without undue social drama. Supposedly, we're good at collective action problems, us rationalists, right? So I propose a thread for the purpose here, with the stipulation that all replies to gap announcements are to be constructive attempts at conveying the relevant procedural knowledge. No asking "how did you manage to be X years old without knowing that?" - if the gap-haver wishes to volunteer the information, that is fine, but asking is to be considered poor form.
(And yes, I have one. It's this: how in the world do people go about the supposedly atomic action of investing in the stock market? Here I am, sitting at my computer, and suppose I want a share of Apple - there isn't a button that says "Buy Our Stock" on their website. There goes my one idea. Where do I go and what do I do there?)
I'll reuse my example: if you knew for certain that Facebook would be as huge as it was, what stocks, exactly, would you have invested in, pre-IPO, to capture gains from its growth? Remember, you don't know anything else, like that Google will go up from its IPO, you don't know anything about Apple being a huge success - all you know is that some social network will some day exist and will grow hugely. The best I can think of would be to sell any Murdoch stock you owned when you heard they were buying MySpace, but offhand I'm not sure that Murdoch didn't just stagnate rather than drop as MySpace increasingly turned out to be a writeoff. In the hypothetical that you didn't know the name of the company, you might've bought up a bunch of Google stock hoping that Orkut would be the winner, but while that would've been a decent investment (yay!) it would have had nothing to do with Orkut (awww!); illustrating the problem with highly illiquid markets in some areas...
Depends on the specifics. Suppose the home robotic growth were concentrated in a single private company which exploded into the billions of annual revenue and took away the market share of all the others, forcing them to go bankrupt or merge or shrink. Home robotics will have increased - keikaku doori! - yet Vaniver's fund suffered huge losses or gone bankrupt (reindex when one of the robotics companies suffers share price collapses? Reindex into what, exactly? Another one of the doomed firms?). Then after the time period elapses and your special knowledge has become public knowledge, the robotics company goes public, and by EMH shares become a normal gamble where you could lose money as easily as make it.
(Is this an impossibly rare scenario? Well, it sounds a lot like Facebook, actually! They grew fast, roflstomped a bunch of other social networks, there was no way to invest in them or related businesses before the IPO, and post-IPO, I believe investors have done the opposite of profit.)
In case it's not clear: I'm not trying to contradict you; I am trying to get advice from you.
Suppose that you got a mysterious note from the future telling you that the demand for home-robotics will increase tenfold in the next decade, and you know this note to be totally reliable. You know nothing else that is not publicly known. What would you do next?