Long ago, I forget where, I saw a blog post that applied this to writing. It pointed out that if we model the quality of your writing as having a mean X and variance Y, then the only way to hit those unlikely exceptionally good texts is to write a lot. Yes, while doing so you might also come up with the same number of exceptionally bad texts, but nobody forces you to show those to anyone. Plus writing a lot will give you practice, gradually pushing up the mean.
From personal experience, I'd also err on the side of publishing even texts you're not personally all that impressed by. I've noticed that I'm relatively bad at estimating what's going to be popular. Some of my biggest hits have been blog posts I'd never have thought would be popular.
Writing massive amounts of text also helps with self-estimation as a person who can write arbitrary amounts of text. My evolution as a writer started with me going "meh, I can't finish anything, I have all these ideas that I sometimes start but then I lose interest after a few pages". Then I started writing collaboratively with a friend, which was so much fun that I could say, "I like writing, at least of this kind, so much that I was on Utah time in Scotland to stay up and write more, for as much as seventeen hours straight." Then I wrote a finished novel... it was fanfiction, but I already considered worldbuilding my strength and character creation also on said list. Then I did it again. At some point I started being "a writer", who can decide to do things like "write a book" and have books exist as a result of this decision.
Personally I would have put the main idea as the 'plus'. Perhaps overstated but clearly not wrong.
If the quality of works is distributed around a mean then more works you produce the more likely it is for a high quality work to emerge. The most remarkable works will come from the very best authors when they are having a really good day (or month or year). Producing more from the same distribution will obviously give more chances for you to produce something that is outstanding.
On a related note a 'one hit wonder' can be said to be regressing to his mean when his other works flop.
Not 'just wrong'. It's just obvious and less important overall than the training effect.
i agree with the spirit of this post but I think you're leaving out an important part. It seems from the other comments that the experiment described never really happened. I think if it were tried it wouldn't really work out as described. I know if i had been in that class and been in the quantity group, I would have made some really crappy, really thick pots and been done as quickly as possible in order to goof off for the maximum amount of time. If I had been in the quality group I wouldn't have theorized about it, I just would have iterated on a lump of clay. Making a pot and then not firing it or anything, just mashing it back into a lump and starting over until I got to a really good one. I think I would have learned a lot more about pot making in the quality group.
What I have read and also experienced is that producing quantity is necessary but not sufficient for producing quality. If you want to get really good at something, rather than just getting somewhat good and then plateauing, you have to not only do it a lot, but you have to care deeply about how good you are doing, identify your weaknesses and work specifically to improve those. The problem with your story is that...
The problem with your story is that the quantity kids have no incentive to produce quality, so they probably just won't.
No incentive? Don't you think they signed up for pottery class to, you know, learn how to do good pottery? That nobody wanted to be proud of their work?
(Btw, I heard this pottery story from a different source, and IIRC it was an adult pottery class, not a kids' one.)
This story is about rapid iteration rather than quantity. The "quantity" is the detritus of evolution created while learning to produce a perfect pot. If a machine was producing pots it would generate great quantity but the quality would not vary from one iteration to the next.
There are many stories and heuristics in engineering lore suggesting rapid iteration converges on quality faster than careful design. See also: OODA loops, the equivalent military heuristic.
I'm brand new to Less Wrong, and very pleased that I found a topic right away that I have given a great deal of thought to already, since it's affected me throughout my life. I grew up with a mother who was constantly critical, and stingy or withholding of praise, with the result that my sister and I, who are both in our late 40s, still converse about the negative affect that my mother had on us when it comes to making mistakes, and attempting to do new things.
I used to feel that I was being scolded because I didn't know something I "ought to have known" in advance. I'm not referring to breaking some established rule in the family. I'm talking about being blindsided by sudden harsh words in a loud volume about something I had never heard about or considered before, something that I had had the nerve to "get wrong." This happened often enough that I began thinking that I had better not try to do things unless I knew EVERYTHING there was to know BEFORE I took any action. This, not surprisingly, had the affect of paralyzing me into inaction, fearing the reprisals for "mistakes", and of course, the judgment about what was right and what was wrong was base...
Fear of failure is a big problem in my life right now. Its why I don't have a job, since I'm silly and am afraid of being rejected. This reframed something I think I already knew, but I'm sure it will help anyway. Time to really get on to things now.
Paul Graham said something very similar about figuring out a program:
"I was taught in college that one ought to figure out a program completely on paper before even going near a computer. I found that I did not program this way. I found that I liked to program sitting in front of a computer, not a piece of paper. Worse still, instead of patiently writing out a complete program and assuring myself it was correct, I tended to just spew out code that was hopelessly broken, and gradually beat it into shape. Debugging, I was taught, was a kind of final pas...
I wish to expand on your conclusions and look for their limits. It might be more relevant to the "Go Try Things" post, but it being a kind of series of posts, I suppose it makes sense most to comment here.
So, data collection is good. But aside of getting one better at some area in which one tries to reach expertise or improvement, data collection is also good for discovering almost totally new facets of reality, territory that is outside the map's margins.
Data collection bring to light not only known unknowns, but unknown unknowns too. There's a ...
So far as I can tell, the real issue in telling someone that the only important thing is quality, is that it leads to a phenomenon known in some circles as "paralysis by analysis." For instance, a writer could spend a day debating whether or not a particular place needed a comma or not, and miss that the whole page is rubbish. In sports, it is often what is meant when someone is accused of "thinking too much." In football, a receiver might spend his time thinking about how to get around a defender once he has the ball, and forget to cat...
You should hold off on proposing solutions, but you also need to get around to actually trying the proposed solution.
I can almost swear that I was reading a post in the sequences where a statement was made to the effect that "If you already know where you think you'll end up on a decision/analysis/estimation, you should just head in that direction."
Does this ring any bells? I'd like to re-find that and have googled for it many, many ways and never found it again. It seems similar to the idea here, and thus I thought I'd ask for help here in finding it -- I really would like to read it again!
The scoring rule for group B is critically underspecified -- are they being graded on the best pot they produce? The worst? The mean? The median?
You should hold off on proposing solutions, but you also need to get around to actually trying the proposed solution.
I was under the impression that the whole point of holding off on proposing solutions was to make sure you came up with more than one idea.
As a general principle the right answer depends on the consequence of low quality and the balance of creativity versus practice. In medicine where the consequence of low quality (of a surgical operation for instance) may be death of the patient, there still is value to quantity and perfecting technique by frequent practice. Therefore simulations play a role. Ideally the surgeon makes use of much tacit knowledge in a successful operation, many instinctual elements that cannot be put into words. In many tasks like surgery, you want only intermittent creativity. Most efforts go into getting better and better at a task already mastered conceptually, not into improving the concept.
I did a further search online; the quote appears verbatim in many places, but I can't find any additional information which would single out a school or teacher, so I would err on the side of assuming it's fictional.
I'm a bit incredulous about the experiment. The students' quantity of production can always be maximized by decreasing the quality. Why wouldn't they? (Even if the students maintain quality, how could the teacher justify assuming this in advance.)
Evaluating the study formally as an experiment, attention to quality is confounded with spending time on the work. (Reiteration is a different story, but in this case we seem to be talking about moving on to a different project, rather than perfecting a single design.) Did the students evaluated on quality produce...
Followup to: Don't Fear Failure
In the same theme as the last article, I think that failure is actually pretty important in learning. Rationality needs data, and trying is a good source of it.
When you're trying to do something new, you probably won't be able to do it right the first time. Even if you obsess over it. Jeff Atwood is a programmer who says Quantity Always Trumps Quality
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A".Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
Where have I heard this before?
Quantity always trumps quality.
When it comes to software, the same rule applies. If you aren't building, you aren't learning. Rather than agonizing over whether you're building the right thing, just build it. And if that one doesn't work, keep building until you get one that does.
The people who tried more did better, even though they failed more too. Of course you shouldn't try to fail, but you shouldn't let the fear of it stop you from tyring.
I wouldn't go as far as to say that quantity always trumps quality, but where the cost of failure is low lots of failures that you pay attention to is a pretty good way of learning. You should hold off on proposing solutions, but you also need to get around to actually trying the proposed solution.
I'm normed such that I'll spend more time talking about if something will work than trying it out to see if it works. The problem is that if you don't know about something already, your thoughts about what will work aren't going to be particularly accurate. Trying something will very conclusively demonstrate if something works or not.
Note:
I originally had this as part of Don't Fear Failure, but that post got too long.