The Partial Control Fallacy

I mostly agree with this, but don't discount the idea of only improving by a couple percent. Most things (like grants) are stack ranked, and if everybody has between an 85% and 95%, a 10% improvement could put you at the top of the list.

There's a similar argument about athletics. Sure, the people who win gold medals and get MVP at the Super Bowl have amazing genetics, but they also worked crazy hard to get there. Your hard work isn't going to get you a gold medal, but if they didn't work for it, they wouldn't get it either.

The core message is good, though: if you don't have whole package, don't apply the polish. But if you think you have a shot, don't think you can skate by on what you already have.

Parkinson's law of triviality (aka bikeshedding) could be considered a subset of this behaviour.

Bikeshedding is when a group of people form opinions about, and squabble over something frivolous and irrelevant, but appealing to the lowest common denominator.

Offer a group of people the opportunity to design a nuclear powered aircraft carrier, and no one says boo, but ask them which color is prettiest for a shed to park their bikes in, and suddenly everybody puts in their two cents, ad-nauseum.

Although they may give out a "rubric"; this is just a smokescreen. In most places, Grad School Fellowships are basically awarded based on 1) whose advisors are hotshots and 2) whose advisors are willing to play politics for them. Very little else matters, unless your essay is a steaming pile.

If you strongly desire a fellowship, I recommend researching which professors' students have gotten them in the past. Then, make sure you are on good terms with your PI, that the PI thinks you are a hard worker (whether or not you actually are), and write milquetoast essays that hit all the science buzzwords and PC stuff ("I'm interested in mentoring minorities"[0] - whether or not you actually do any of that).

[0] I actually did mentor minorities and didn't write about that in my essays, taking a more frank approach about what I thought was wrong with minority recruitment, and I lost out on a fellowship to a guy who now is a professor and has exactly zero nonwhite nonasians in his lab. Let's just say they don't really care about honesty and followthrough.

Incidentally, this student also had a research project where all of the data presented in the primary paper were artefacts of the preparation method (It didn't affect the overall conclusion). I confronted the student about this and even went through the process of repeating the experiment with a better prep, resulting in data that actually made sense. Some of the figures were completely invalid, and one of the subsidiary conclusions was wrong. I suggested that he issue a correction and at least stop talking about the subsidiary conclusion, but he continued to present it at several conferences afterwards, and as far as I can tell, the data have not been corrected in the literature. But he did get that fellowship. And now, is getting NIH grants. Your tax dollars at work.

So? This text is aimed at people who care about the final 10%. People who score zero on every other part of the rubric aren't falling into the partial control fallacy.