>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.
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Ha! I had the same experience in my art evening classes. One evening our teacher told us that we had to produce three paintings in the 2.5 hour lesson. It is challenging enough producing one in that time period. It was a fantastic learning experience in letting go. The first picture I did was OK, the second was better and the third was great - all because I'd given up thinking at that point and was just doing.
Sometimes I get the same feeling when coding, when really in the zone with the magical feeling of flow.
On the other hand, I took a few semesters of elective photography courses in high school, and there’s a certain essential amount of time it takes to make a good photo print and run it through all the chemicals. It can’t really be compressed down shorter than about 35–40 minutes for the whole process with only limited ability to parallelize the work while maintaining quality, which makes it tough to make more than 1 or possibly 2 good prints in 1 class period.
All of the students I knew who focused on making 1 good print every day ended up learning more and making better images than the students who constantly tried to rush.
Apples to oranges. Painting is a purely creative process with style being valued over correctness. While there is artistic decision during manual film development, there is definitely a wrong way to develop a print. If you rush the chemical process, it will end up bad. Film is more like baking in that regard while painting is stove top cooking.
I guess my point is: the important thing to learn here (in my opinion) is that regular deliberate practice with focused attention is helpful, not that people should try to rush out as much sloppy work in as short a time as possible.
Even the highest quantity of practice is not necessarily essential. My impression is that its spacing out over time is even more crucial.
I have a 3.5 year old, and I’ve been watching him learn all sorts of skills (learning to understand and use language, walk, run, jump, ride a balance bike, solve logic puzzles, build with construction toys, draw, ...), and it’s amazing the kinds of leaps he will make in balance, coordination, speed, understanding, etc. at some specific skill over the course of 3 or 4 months, even if we only practice the skill for 20 minutes once every few weeks.
Somehow the brain is churning on it in the background, and there are sudden leaps in ability which can’t be obviously explained based on direct practice time.
The art of a good film photograph isn't printing lots of pieces it's taking 10 shots, and choosing to print two of them.
There are parts you can't rush, there are clear steps to taking clear photos, well exposed photos.
Being able to look at the negative, and know if it turned out well is the shill you learn.
The students who focused on one good print had a lot of prep work. Getting the final step right (for software, shipping and deploying to production) isn't something we should rush. Learning all the steps which lead up to that final one well makes a tremendous difference
Is this maybe then analogous to the essential and accidental complexity premise that Fred Brooks put forwards?
It may be that in painting the cost of accidental complexity can be reduced greatly but in photography due to necessary post-processing there is less on an opportunity.
That doesn't mean there isn't an opportunity here. Being neither a photographer or painter I am most likely not the best person to comment however!
Resonates with the rise of USA. A few books about electricity mentionned that Europe was caught in a neverending debate about ideal theories while US was applying simple tricks and improving understanding on the way.
I'm also wildly guilty of the analysis paralysis... I did try to set up schedules and goals to iterate but it always die before I did any real progress.
Oh and btw, some dude said Wright bros. won the race to flight because they approached it with low cost engineering/lab mindset, rapid prototyping fashion. Other companies with more resources tried the moonshot approach, did 1 so-called plane in 2 years, failed to fly, ran out of resources and died.
Reminds me of SpaceX. everytime I see their BF metal tank blow up, I’m like “yasssss progress”.
I absolutely believe that SpaceX will land a human on Mars in our lifetime. Not sure how long they’ll survive and whether a colony is possible but they’ll definitely make it way cheaper to send shit to mars/moon than it is today.
Also I’m bullish that we’ll make big breakthroughs in DNA and protein folding/interaction understanding. Building with the same molecular machines of life opens up so many possibilities.
What is this from. Love the general idea.
War of Art. Solid book; picked it up after seeing this passage on HN hehe
Art & Fear? It's also the third-highest-score comment on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
yes, its from Art & Fear.
The Art of War is unrelated but also form an insightful fella. more focused on adversarial confrontations than Art & Fear though
So, I have now put /War of Art/ and /Art and Fear/ in my queue. I also have a physical of /Art of War/ somewhere. I'm assuming that is a different thing, though.
yes, it is. no idea why i read Art of War before :-)
I don't think you were alone in that. I stared at it for a while making sure I had it right. :D
I really disliked that book, I found nothing actionable in it.
It is so often recommended that I read it to the end thinking there would be some jewel waiting for me. There wasn't.
The problem with the so called self help book is. There are so obvious for some and totally novel for others.
This does not work for SW. No matter how long they tried quality programs are very very rare.
And when they happen, developers decide they need to "further improve" it, destroying everything that was valuable about it in the first place.
I thought that story had been debunked, the experiment never took place.
Quantity has a quality all of its own.
Cool but fake.
I wonder if there has been a proper psychological study on this. It makes logical sense and corresponds with my real-world experience, but that's not how science works.
You should really post a source.
A source that disproves a made up unsourced story is fake?
And here's the text in another book, courtesy of Google Books, on page 264:
https://books.google.com/books?id=TuvOng_Yh6wC&newbks=0&prin...
The story could still be made up, but the source for the quote is this book:
Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking
by David Bayes and Ted Orland
https://www.amazon.com/Art-Fear-Observations-Rewards-Artmaki...
Here's two that prove it.
[0] - https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality...
prove what? That someone printed the anecdote in a book?
What would suffice, video recordings of every class?
Naming the teacher, the school, the year, the city, something that would give a hint for someone to follow up for verification.
Except for Politicians, Salespeople, and Known Criminals, I tend to take people at their word.
Your approach might be different than mine.
And here's audio of the authors saying that it's a true story:
http://www.innonavi.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/David-Bay...
That's a repetition of the same claim, not a source. He doesn't mention simple information like who or where the class was, which there is no reason to be secret about.
Also, it doesn't pass the obvious sniff test, that a teacher would spend a whole semester giving half of his class a terrible experience that uttery failed to teach them anything, leaving them with "a pile of dead clay" as the author claims.
To be fair, there exist sites like snopes.com which do this type of fact-checking. But I couldn't find it there.
If I were graded solely on quantity, I would produce stuff that only just barely passes the bar of being a pot. (If you take a clump of clay and stick your finger in it, you basically have a pot.) Therefore, I think the story is false.
Nice story though.
But then you'd get sick of making such shitty pots, if you liked pottery as an art form enough to want to learn it, and you'd start trying to make better ones because just passing the bar probably wouldn't be enough for your sense of aesthetics/craftsmanship (or maybe it would, and then you would have learned something as well)
It depends a lot if it is a voluntary art class, or you are forced to take it. (Or it is the only job you could get, and you are not to interested in it.)
True if all you care about are grades (which are what? A badge?). I'd probably knock out what I needed to pass (make it through the gate) and then focus on improving.
Any metric taken to the extreme is worthless.