What is knowledge compounds?

Knowledge compounds is a concept in personal epistemology: Each piece of signal you accumulate makes the next piece more valuable — noise does the opposite.

Example: Two engineers start the same job on the same day. One reads primary sources — RFCs, research papers, system design docs — and writes notes connecting each new concept to what they already know. The other skims Twitter threads, watches random tech talks, and bookmarks articles they never revisit. After three years, the first engineer sees architectural patterns instantly because every new system maps onto a dense web of prior understanding. The second has consumed more content but retained less — each disconnected piece decayed in isolation. Same industry, same hours spent. Radically different compounding curves.

This concept is part of Phase 7 (Signal vs Noise) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for signal vs noise.