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leogao

This is a special post for quick takes by leogao. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

a famous resulf in psychology is that if you tell a class of photography students to produce one extremely high quality photo, they actually produce worse photos than another class told only to produce a lot of decent photos, because in making lots of decent photos you learn way more about photography through trial and error, whereas the high quality photo group tends to spend irrationally much time making each try as perfect as possible.

does this effect actually replicate, especially across domains?

I've seen "spam volume" in dating advice, putting out a lot of steam games to appeal to a certain audience (one asset-flippy kind of dev was mentioned as doing that on a YouTube video), and how LLM responses are easy to ask for in a way where you can ask multiple LLM's and choose what you like (either to confirm accuracy or people who are cycling through a lot of prototype designs). I'm not sure it applies to all domains but the more general "do more = good" seems to obviously replicate.

This would be interesting to me as well to test, but in some of the aspects I am not sure how you'd compare, for example paying unskilled gamedevs to make many small games instead of a big one

1Steveot4mo

Just curious: You made the strong claim that it was a famous result, didn't you know whether there were actual experiments before you made that claim? I'm just wondering what level of rigour to expect with these quick takes.

5leogao4mo

i would love to fund a microgrant for someone to actually run an experiment like this

leogao's Shortform

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leogao's Shortform

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