Psychology:

• Thorndike1921 on the poor correlation of experience/expertise

• The Range of Human Capacities, Wechsler 1935_89ya (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^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”, Gottfredson 1997_27ya; “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)

• “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 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_12ya; “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?”

  • “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

• “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”)

“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”