Incompetence is the norm; most people who engage in a task (even when incentivized for performance or engaging in it for countless hours) may still be making basic errors which could be remedied with coaching or deliberate practice.
A mule who has carried a pack for 10 campaigns under Prince Eugene will be no better a tactician for it, and it must be confessed, to the disgrace of humanity, that many men grow old in an otherwise respectable profession without making any greater progress than this mule.
Frederick the Great, “Thoughts on Tactics”1
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Psychology:
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1921 on the poor correlation of experience/expertise
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The Range of Human Capacities, 1935 (where absolute measures of performance, such as running speed, are available, a sample of ~1000 healthy normal people will span a range of only ~3×—so if you can do 1.5× more of something than the median person, then you may well be in the 99.9th percentile?)
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Deliberate practice, eg. 1989 (insufficient, but necessary, and oft needed)
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“Why g Matters: The Complexity of Everyday Life”, 1997; “Everyday Life as an Intelligence Test: Effects of Intelligence and Intelligence Context”, 1997
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“Stupider Than You Realize” (on adult Literacy in the United States; see also McNamara’s Folly)
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“Study: Average Person’s Life Plan Can Only Withstand 25 Seconds Of Direct Questioning”
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Games:
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“Playing to Win”, 2006
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“95%-ile isn’t that good”/“Willingness to look stupid”, Dan Luu
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StarCraft: “Worker Rush: Descent to Bronze” (2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9/10/11), Gheed
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Chess: “My days as a teenage chess teacher”, Tyler Cowen (his writing practice); “How Long Does It Take Ordinary People To ‘Get Good’ At Chess?”, Joseph Wong; “Assessing Human Error Against a Benchmark of Perfection”, et al 2016; “The Secret Life of Seconds: The Minds Behind the World Chess Championship”; Viswanathan Anand
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Go: AlphaGo Zero; “How Does AI Improve Human Decision-Making? Evidence from the AI-Powered Go Program”, et al 2021
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Athletics: “Better All the Time: How the “performance revolution” came to athletics—and beyond”; “Personal Best: Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?”; “One One-Hundredth of a Second Faster: Building Better Olympic Athletes”; et al 2022
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Halo: “Mastering the Art of War: How Patterns of Gameplay Influence Skill in Halo”, et al 2013
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Economics:
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“Nicholas Bloom on Management, Productivity, and Scientific Progress”; “Lessons from The Profit”
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“Why Do Management Practices Differ across Firms and Countries?”, Bloom & Van 2010
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“Does Management Matter? Evidence from India”, et al 2012; “Do Management Interventions Last? Evidence from India”, et al 2020
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“Management as a Technology?”, et al 2017; “Why Do We Undervalue Competent Management?”
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“Does management training help entrepreneurs grow new ventures? Field experimental evidence from Singapore”, et al 2019; “A Scientific Approach to Entrepreneurial Decision Making: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial [in Italy]”, et al 2019
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“Managers and Productivity in Retail”, et al 2023
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“Getting Down to Business: Chain Ownership and Fertility Clinic Performance”, La 2024
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“IQ, trading behavior, and performance”, et al 2012
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“Moving off the Map: How Knowledge of Organizational Operations Empowers and Alienates”, 2019
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Reliability, Maintainability and Risk, appendix (Human error in industrial tasks: rates appear to not fall much below 1/10,000 for even the simplest tasks—the lowest quoted is 1/100,000 for “overfill[ing] bath”)
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“Why Can’t Programmers… Program?”, Jeff Atwood
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“The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think”
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“Experiment: a good researcher is hard to find”; or a secretary
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/r/ididnthaveeggs: “Reviews by people who don’t follow a recipe and then complain that it sucks.”
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Physics:
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Newtonian: David Hestenes’s demonstration of the persistence of Aristotelian folk-physics in physics students as all they had learned was guessing passwords; on the test used, see eg. 1985 & et al 1992
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Quantum: “Design and validation of the Quantum Mechanics Conceptual Survey”, et al 2010
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See Also: “Terrorism is not Effective”, “On Having Enough Socks”, “Local Optima & Greedy Choices”, “The Effectiveness of Unreasonable Small Groups”, “The Illusion of Psychological Depth”
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Translated on pg47, “The Sovereign and the Study of War”, Frederick the Great on the Art of War, Jay 1966/1999 ISBN 0-306-80908-7; Luvaas cites it to “Réflexions sur la tactique et sur quelques parties de la guerre, ou Réflexions sur quelques changesments dans la facon de fairre la guerre”, Oeuvres 28, pg153–154 [Réflexions sur la tactique], of Oeuvres de Frederic le Grand (30 volumes, 1846–101856168ya).↩︎