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Comment by yay_cloud2 | Hacker News Reader

Your comment reminds me of the exercise where a class was split into two cohorts, one was tasked with producing just one clay pot (I can't remember the thing now), while the other cohort was tasked with making one per day or something similar.

Put simply, one group put all of its energy into producing just one, and the other group just turned out pot after pot after pot.

At the end, so the story goes, the group that cranked out pots like crazy ended up producing pots of higher quality.

In my own life, I can often find out the thing that I'm afraid of learning because I've set it up like that first cohort: making the one perfect thing, instead of putting it out there and iterating on it or making another based on what I learned. Goes with learning languages (I'd do way better if I simply tried speaking every day, but I wait for perfect opportunities).

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> (I can't remember the thing now)

Don’t worry about the details; it was just a made-up story in the book Art & Fear; I have never seen any evidence such a pottery class ever existed. https://kk.org/cooltools/art-fear/

> 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.

How hard did you look for that evidence?

I looked for it before and reached the same conclusion -- it is just a made-up story.

These are the same pots they boil the frogs in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

and cook the soup in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup

having turned to boiling the stone after exhausting all their methods of drawing blood from it

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/blood_from_a_stone

I think this rings true for learning. Early on in the learning process people need to focus on just doing a bunch of stuff and failing quick and then looping back to the beginning. Focusing on perfection with no foundation, in my experience is usually a surefire way to create things of lower quality

Looks like I have been pwned; thanks for pointing that out. Guess there was a reason that no good footnote existed in my memory for the origin of the anecdote.

Part of what stuck out to me, though, was that the anecdote aligned with my personal experiences of things that were once difficult until I ended up having to do them everyday for one reason or another.

But you're right, that's still a far way off from there being some actual study or otherwise repeatable exercise to show this in a clinical setting for learning new skills.

The specific anecdote may have been fabricated, but the principle is sound. An example is the marshmallow problem[1], where a group is given some materials and is asked to build, under time pressure, the tallest tower they can with a marshmallow on top. Adults generally fare poorly because they don't experiment enough, building a tall tower and placing a marshmallow on the top as time is running out, only to have the tower collapse under the newly introduced weight. Children often do much better because they start with small, simple structures and iterate quickly.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_build_a_tower?language=e...

I don't know if that is really the same principle as the pottery anecdote however, it's not about experimenting but a narrative enforcing the concept 'practice makes perfect', related I suppose but not the same.

And anyway the pottery principle is not really sound either - I can suppose that the group tasked with producing a pot a day produces a better pot at the end than the group that was given a long time, but let us assume pot-makers both extremely skilled - one is tasked with making a pot a day for 30 days, the other making a pot in 30 days - which pot under those conditions will be better? The pottery principle is only interesting in explaining how to build a skill, but does not have anything to say about what to expect from those who have already mastered a skill.

The pot story is only valid if learning happens.

You can make the same very bad $creative_product every day indefinitely without improving at all.

Which is why there has to be at least some assessment and feedback. That's the big benefit of having a teacher, mentor, and/or the feedback of peers, customers, or an audience.

If you have a mediocre talent they'll steer you towards making the most of it. If you have exceptional talent their feedback may be wrong or misleading, but it should at least make you think more deeply about your relationship with what you're doing.

You can't assess your own work realistically unless you have something to compare it with, and the critical skills to understand which features matter.

And in relation to programming, entrepreneurship, etc. getting basic experience doing "the full pipline" matters. Releasing _anything_ gives you experience in preparing _something_ for release, whereas if you tried making a perfect program you would miss out on what matters early on for an eventual release and be able to coordinate those for your next product.

There have also been discussion about the same thing happening in music and science. That is, the people who produce the best work also produce the most work, and a lot of that work is bad. But some of it is very, very good.

Perhaps related to Sturgeon's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

Which is much like the Harvard or Yale study (it's usually one or the other) that shows people with specific goals and an action plan do ten times better than those without. Nice to know, except, it's all made up: https://www.peer.ca/Singles/MM255.pdf

There have of course been studies on goal setting and achievement (one of which is mentioned in the above pdf) but while they show an effect, they don't show the spectacular results of the made up study.

This story is somewhat true actually if you correct for the literary license taken.

James Clear reached out to the authors of Art& Fear and this is his footnote: (Link:https://jamesclear.com/repetitions)

This story comes from page 29 of Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland. In an email conversation with Orland on October 18, 2016, he explained the origins of the story. “Yes, the ‘ceramics story’ in ‘Art & Fear’ is indeed true, allowing for some literary license in the retelling. Its real-world origin was as a gambit employed by photographer Jerry Uelsmann to motivate his Beginning Photography students at the University of Florida. As retold in ‘Art & Fear’ it faithfully captures the scene as Jerry told it to me—except I replaced photography with ceramics as the medium being explored. Admittedly, it would’ve been easier to retain photography as the art medium being discussed, but David Bayles (co-author) & I are both photographers ourselves, and at the time we were consciously trying to broaden the range of media being referenced in the text. The intriguing thing to me is that it hardly matters what art form was invoked—the moral of the story appears to hold equally true straight across the whole art spectrum (and even outside the arts, for that matter).” Later in that same email, Orland said, “You have our permission to reprint the any or all of the ‘ceramics’ passage in your forthcoming book.” In the end, I settled on publishing an adapted version, which combines their telling of the ceramics story with facts from the original source of Uelsmann’s photography students. David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking (Santa Cruz, CA: Image Continuum Press, 1993), 29.

It's a ironic to me that the original inspiration for the story was not ceramics, but photography. My main pastime is photography, and I took this advice to heart and started being as prolific as possible, which is something that digital photography has made easy and compared to film, inexpensive. It was a great relief to just accept that the first attempts at anything are going to be terrible and that failure was a necessary barrier to entry of getting good. Ten years, and tens of thousands of photos later and I've gained a lot of experience and produced some work that I'm proud to call my own.

I believe it was Henri Cartier-Bresson who quipped (or at least has had it attributed to him) that "Your first ten thousand photos are your worst."

I've found that using digital to gather new skills is terrific, but yet I find some of the work I am most satisfied with is analog; I believe it is mostly down to my own lack of self discipline - when shooting digital, exposures are free and hence I shoot lots and lots.

When out with my Texas Leica (A Fuji G690BL, a 6*9 rangefinder), getting eight exposures to the roll, I take those extra couple of moments to ensure I get it all right.

I think there needs to be a balance. If we want to keep talking about pots at my workplace there are people who produce the same pot quickly but never ever improve. Then there are others who talk about great pots but never make one. And then there are some that produce a little slower but each pot gets better. Depending on the situation probably any of these approaches makes sense sometime.

I've heard a very similar story but with a photo class at UF from James Clear's Atomic Habits. Still, very interesting outcome, although I can't say I was surprised based on the odds. Thanks for the share.

https://jamesclear.com/repetitions

I’ve heard this lil story before but honestly both strategies are really dependent on the situation.

There might be situations where’d you want to continually churn out pots. In other situations, pressure is really high, and you have one shot to get it right.

Both strategies depend on the context. If anything, the best approach is to figure out which strategy is needed for the given situation. I would imagine, strategy of churning out pots is the most common one.

But safety critical systems certainly need that pot to be right the first time otherwise people die.

Yea, sometimes if the stakes are high enough you may have to get it right without multiple attempts.

Depending on your time constraints, the tips given here seem to apply particularly well: find proxy problems that allows you to learn without as much hardship would be a good idea, as well as the other strategies of breaking it down, etc.

Sometimes time is not on your side though, and you have to get it right without time to practice on proxy problems (at least I believe this can occur).

Then you can use what I call it the 'Kitchen sink' approach: grab a bunch of tools, a bunch of approaches and start digesting your problem through as many viewpoints as possible. If your problem has safety implications and you can verify it, then well enough. Otherwise you make an attempt if you are sufficiently confident in your solution; and take some kind of NOP otherwise (if a guaranteed 0-return NOP even exists).

Also, if you're solving something while time constrained, you may need to reflect afterwards if you could have either prevented the time constraint or prepared better somehow.

In general though, there's hope in the sense that if something is verifiable or approximately-verifiable you can approach good solutions with time. At least I have high hopes of always finding a solution given enough time (i.e. "You're not good enough" does not exist).

That's only not applicable if your time is finite or in the same vein you need to improve a skill to apply a series of finite-time decisions. Eh who cares about finite time anyway? :P

(Yes, in reality everything is limited but there are plenty of tasks you can take your time with...)

The pot challenge is one group is they get graded just on number of pots made vs. the other on a single pot they can submit. The group trying to perfect one pot ends up making worse quality pots than the quantity group because the quantity group ends up getting way more practice.

That anecdote gives me lots of hope. I hope it's accurate! :)

One thing to note about the pot challenge - it works because making a pot is a physical skill that improves with repetition in a situation where mistakes are really obvious. If you were to apply the same principle to something else it might not work at all.

If you just write a huge amount of code rather than examining what's good or bad about code you wrote, you'd probably end up writing the same bad code over and over again. Seeing where improvements can be made is sometimes really not obvious and can feel like you're going backwards. For example, learning where functional programming applies instead of writing a class for everything. You need to be able to understand why something is better for simple repetition to work.

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