“Quantity vs quality in pottery is a lie” by becausecurious

LessWrong (30+ Karma) · Oct 12, 2026 · 5m

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…