111–120 of 134 posts
In a way I feel like quality vs quantity is a false dichotomy. What's important is deliberate practice, which can be deficient in either. Is it worth doing 100 reps in the gym if they're all with bad form? It's better to solve the same problem in 5 ways or 5 different problems once?
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Agreed 1000%! I think ‘do the busy work’ can even be applied more broadly: Years ago I ran a small business in my mid-20s, and one of the critical mistakes I made was getting hopelessly behind in our bookkeeping (and by hopelessly behind I mean it - things were going well and the bank account kept going up, so I kinda just piled the sales receipts on top of each other for close to a year). When the company started to…
This. And it's often not even that much work after all, given the amount of energy that went into procrastination and finding easier solutions. I've know this professionally for a long time now, but only recently "found out" that this applies to my personal/family bookkeeping process too. I've always been looking for easy automated solutions for importing and categorising my transactions until I read an article here…
Turns out, everything I hated about QuickBooks for all these years centered around its inability to bulk-edit transactions or categorize/recategorize things en masse, leading to countless hours wasted clicking or, worse, those bulk journal entires to move things from one place to another (which forces you to follow a breadcrumb path of asset movements, which is a nightmare).
But when everything is just a list of things in a text file, you get the power of every great text editor on earth (vi, emacs, or whatever) and can make mass changes trivially. Life's much much much much better this way.
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Reminds me of a line attributed to Bruce Lee: "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."
Jackie Chan had a similar attitude toward his films. He once said in an interview: >Whatever you do, do the best you can, because the film lives forever. No, "because that day it was raining and the actor don't have time." >I said, "would you go to every theater and tell the audience?" No! The audience sits in the theater: good movie? Bad movie? That's all. And he practiced what he preached, sometimes going through h…
Typically for films the shooting portion takes only a few weeks to finish, so lots of retakes = money lost. Jackie Chan does a lot of random flourishes in his films that end up with him needing a lot of takes. For example, how he scales fences. [1]
The way he scales the castle wall in Wheels on Meals (1984) is probably my favorite example.
I'm reasonably sure that it was a pottery class (or study) in which students/study participants were asked to produce either the best piece they could think of or as many as possible. I think it was actually a study that I read about. It might need some internet sleuthing to find it. I'll try later. I do not think that it is surprising that practice improves skills though (well, except for people with an exceptionall…
Of course, the idea that you need practice to be good at things is obvious. But first, that's not quite the claim in the anecdote, which is about being told to aim for high quality. In any case, the vivid anecdote would be better off if people were clear that it's a hypothetical.
"Quantity leads to quality." The analogy of being graded on quantity in an art class tends to make me imagine I'd just line up a ton of canvases and slop paint on them all at once to be the top of the class, or create pots in only their crudest acceptable form. That is, quantity does not lead to quality by itself. The student must be trying to learn something new with each new piece. Quantity iterates the feedback lo…
My music teacher often reminded my of this Lombardi quote which really resonated with me: "Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect."
As a creative person (UX designer, cartoonist, painter), I have experienced this throughout my life, especially in drawing. As a kid I drew constantly, in school, at home, everywhere. All through my life I drew and drew. If quantity was all it took, I would be a master. But I am not. I still can't draw bodies and poses and Im not consistent at all.
Quantity gets you to learn quickly to a point where you platou. I've seen this in my painting, games, and even work.
You need to pause and start thinking about what you are doing, what each part means, how it works together, coming up with what you are doing wrong, what is right, and practice that. You still need to put in more work but its a dance of pause, think, do, repeat.
I realize this is a silly criticism, but it's strange that the author would write about how it's valuable to make a lot of stuff but then to only write 11 sentences about the topic. It seems like it would be much better way to demonstrate the point if the author wrote 100 pages about producing more work/art/code, without any rhyme or reason or editing. After all, the thesis is "Quantity leads to quality", why not jus…
I'm reasonably sure that it was a pottery class (or study) in which students/study participants were asked to produce either the best piece they could think of or as many as possible. I think it was actually a study that I read about. It might need some internet sleuthing to find it. I'll try later. I do not think that it is surprising that practice improves skills though (well, except for people with an exceptionall…
I have never seen a reliable source for this anecdote. I strongly believe it's fictional. Most of the sources either don't cite anything, or go back to Art and Fear, and the presentation there doesn't say anything about where this happened. Of course, the idea that you need practice to be good at things is obvious. But first, that's not quite the claim in the anecdote, which is about being told to aim for high qualit…
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Unix vs Multix. Plan 9 and GNU Herd vs Linux. Spring vs EJB. Rest vs Soap vs CORBA. C vs Algol. It's easier to do something simple and iterate on it than to do something perfect from the start.
I get your point, but wasn't Linux the simple solution that got improved over time vs GNU Hurd which tried to implement the perfect micro-kernel architecture?
EDIT: Ah, you mean the order is different :)
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Newton's notebook was published here a while ago. http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-04000/40 There's a ton of work behind the genius. There's no "apple on the head" story, almost never.
Newton was just incredible. The man polished his own lenses for his experiments. This, although there were already professional lens makers in England at the time, and they were better than him. Today, these antics would be dismissed as "bad practice", "reinventing the wheel", "losing two weeks rewriting a stupid lens" or some other corporate bullshit. But his great insights on the nature of light came from the very…
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Why is a study or a concrete example necessary, if I might ask. It works perfectly fine as a thought experiment.
Some thought experiments tell you a useful answer. But this thought experiment doesn't tell you what works, as either outcome is quite compelling and plausible. So it's not much use as a thought experiment, other than to show that it might be interesting to study it in the real world. I.e. it might be "obvious" to you that focus on quantity over quality leads to better quality as assessed by another in the thought ex…
Also since this human behaviour we talking about here. Experimental Psychology is a field known for its credibility crisis, its inconsistent and possible non-reproduceable results, that I have not much faith in it to give us useful insights, and I would be more interested in hearing many of those matters addressed from a purely theoretic point of view, than through conclusions from dubious experimental data.