A significant chunk of human knowledge is not publicly accessible. You cannot self-teach how to make a modern aircraft, jet engine, nuclear reactor, radar tech, advanced metallurgy etc.
Similarly, I would wager most of the useful economics and financial theory that humans have come up with is only known to hedge or prop trading firms.
For some subjects, the entire journal-published academic body of knowledge for it is probably some useless fraction of the whole and university academia is operating nowhere close to the cutting edge. People are probably doing PhDs today on theses that some defense contractor or HFT firm already discovered 20 years ago.
Even things like specialized medical knowledge, I would wager is largely passed down through mentor-mentee tradition and/or private notes as opposed to textbooks. It's unlikely that you can teach yourself how to do surgery just from textbooks. I once had a pathologist's report use a term for a skin condition that was quite literally ungoogleable. The skin condition itself was fairly ordinary, but the term used was outright esoteric and yet probably used on a daily basis by that pathologist. Where did he learn it from?
Taylor Wilson built a nuclear reactor at his home when he was 14. People build jet engines and put them on modern model aircraft every day.
If the instructions aren’t immediately available, the internet provides connections and forums to find anything your heart desires.
Information wants to be free.
Arbitraging micro-opportunities (or far more likely, deploying insider information masked as HFT or some secret sauce arbitrage) is not economically useful.
Similarly, I would wager most of the useful economics and financial theory that humans have come up with is only known to hedge or prop trading firms.
For some subjects, the entire journal-published academic body of knowledge for it is probably some useless fraction of the whole and university academia is operating nowhere close to the cutting edge. People are probably doing PhDs today on theses that some defense contractor or HFT firm already discovered 20 years ago.
Even things like specialized medical knowledge, I would wager is largely passed down through mentor-mentee tradition and/or private notes as opposed to textbooks. It's unlikely that you can teach yourself how to do surgery just from textbooks. I once had a pathologist's report use a term for a skin condition that was quite literally ungoogleable. The skin condition itself was fairly ordinary, but the term used was outright esoteric and yet probably used on a daily basis by that pathologist. Where did he learn it from?
Not everything is on the Internet.