Epistemic status: I traced one famous anecdote to its printed source and to both coauthors' own accounts of where it came from. Confident it was never a study. No claim either way about whether quantity beats quality in general.

AI use: research (tracing the story to the book, to the coauthors' emails and to earlier LessWrong threads), fact-check of every claim against the sources, footnotes, grammar.

I was reading a book and stumbled onto a claim that there was an experiment. A group of students learning pottery was divided into two groups. One group was told that they would be evaluated based on volume, i.e. the number of pieces they produced. The other group was told that they would be evaluated based on the quality of their best piece. Then both groups were compared based on the quality of the best piece, and the "quantity" group showed better results.

I was extremely intrigued by this experiment and was curious to understand how big the groups were and how they evaluated the quality of a pottery piece (there must be some way to quantify that for the sake of the comparison?).

To my surprise, this wasn't a scientific study, but an anecdote from the book Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland (page 29 of the Image Continuum edition).^[1]So all the details available about this result are:

Students were divided into 2 groups based on their physical position in the studio (left vs right), which is not properly random.
The quantity group's evaluation criterion was the total weight of their pots: 50 pounds -> A, 40 pounds -> B.
The quality group needed to produce only one pot, but it had to be perfect to get an A (the book does not specify what perfect means).
Results: "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." Again, no mention of a definition of the quality metric, nor of the effect magnitude. What does "all works of highest quality" even mean? If you sort all the produced works by quality, where does "highest quality" stop? You have t...

Nick

Nick