Psychology:

• Thorndike1921 on the poor correlation of experience/expertise

• The Range of Human Capacities, Wechsler1935 (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 99.9^th percentile?)

• Deliberate practice, eg. Chamblis1989 (insufficient, but necessary, and oft needed)

• “On Bloom’s 2 sigma problem: A systematic review of the effectiveness of mastery learning, tutoring, and direct instruction”

• “Why g Matters: The Complexity of Everyday Life”, Gottfredson1997; “Everyday Life as an Intelligence Test: Effects of Intelligence and Intelligence Context”, Gordon1997

• “Stupider Than You Realize” (on adult Literacy in the United States; see also McNamara’s Folly); “They Don’t Read Very Well: A [2015_11ya] Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities”, Baty et al 2024 (discussion)

• “Study: Average Person’s Life Plan Can Only Withstand 25 Seconds Of Direct Questioning”

Games:

• “Playing to Win”, Sirlin2006

• “95%-ile isn’t that good”/“Willingness to look stupid”, Dan Luu; “The One Book Barrier”; “The Dead Planet Theory: No one does anything, the bar is lower than you think”

• “The Try Harder Fallacy”

• StarCraft: “Worker Rush: Descent to Bronze” (2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9/10/11), Gheed

• 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”, Anderson et al 2016; “The Secret Life of Seconds: The Minds Behind the World Chess Championship”; Viswanathan Anand

• Go: AlphaGo Zero; “How Does AI Improve Human Decision-Making? Evidence from the AI-Powered Go Program”, Choi et al 2021

• 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”; Maynard et al 2022

• Halo: “Mastering the Art of War: How Patterns of Gameplay Influence Skill in Halo”, Huang et al 2013

• Tic-tac-toe

Economics:

• “Nicholas Bloom on Management, Productivity, and Scientific Progress”; “Lessons from The Profit”

  • “Why Do Management Practices Differ across Firms and Countries?”, Bloom & Van Reenen2010

  • “Does Management Matter? Evidence from India”, Bloom et al 2012; “Do Management Interventions Last? Evidence from India”, Bloom et al 2020

  • “Management as a Technology?”, Bloom et al 2017; “Why Do We Undervalue Competent Management?”

  • “Organizational Barriers to Technology Adoption: Evidence from Soccer-Ball Producers in Pakistan”, Atkin et al 2017

  • “The Impact of Consulting Services on Small and Medium Enterprises: Evidence from a Randomized Trial in Mexico”, Bruhn et al 2018

  • “Does management training help entrepreneurs grow new ventures? Field experimental evidence from Singapore”, Kotha et al 2019; “A Scientific Approach to Entrepreneurial Decision Making: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial [in Italy]”, Camuffo et al 2019

  • “Lifting Growth Barriers for New Firms: Evidence from an Entrepreneurship Training Experiment with Two Million Online Businesses”, Jin & Sun2021

  • “Managers and Productivity in Retail”, Metcalfe et al 2023

  • “Getting Down to Business: Chain Ownership and Fertility Clinic Performance”, La Forgia & Bodner2024

  • “Creating the ‘American Way’ of Business: Evidence from WWII in the United States”, Giorcelli2024

  • “Why Businesses Fail: Underadoption of Improved Practices by Brazilian Micro-Enterprises”, de Oliveira2024

• “IQ, trading behavior, and performance”, Grinblatt et al 2012

• “Moving off the Map: How Knowledge of Organizational Operations Empowers and Alienates”, Huising2019

• 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”. It’s easy to declare when AIs are AGI, but do you have the courage to declare humans are not NGI?)

“Why Can’t Programmers… Program?”, Jeff Atwood

“The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think”

“Experiment: a good researcher is hard to find”; or a secretary

“Do Ten Times as Much: Unpleasant advice that works”

/r/ididnthaveeggs: “Reviews by people who don’t follow a recipe and then complain that it sucks.”

Physics:

• 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. Halloun & Hestenes1985 & Hestenes et al 1992

• Quantum: “Design and validation of the Quantum Mechanics Conceptual Survey”, McKagan et al 2010

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”