"Quantity vs quality in pottery is a lie" by becausecurious

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 based on volume, i.e. the number of pieces they produced. The other group was told that they would be evaluated based on the quality of their best piece. Then both groups were compared based on the quality of the best piece, and the "quantity" group showed better results.

I was extremely intrigued by this experiment and was curious to understand how big the groups were and how they evaluated the quality of a pottery piece (there must be some way to quantify that for the sake of the comparison?).

To my surprise, this wasn't a scientific study, but [...]

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
October 12th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LrAqM4bGmAoA79rP3/quantity-vs-quality-in-pottery-is-a-lie

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.