While it’s true that (sometimes) Quantity Makes Quality, it has to be the right kind of quantity. In the photography class example in that note - the students who took the most pictures took the highest quality pictures because what they were doing just so happened to line up with a quantity ➡️ quality setup. Photography is a “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” activity. Taking many pictures is akin to running many Low-Cost Trials. The key is that the students didn’t just take 1,000s of photos of the same thing, they took 1,000s of photos across the whole semester, in a wide range of scenarios. I assume many of them wound up accidentally learning that a scenario they wouldn’t have predicted to make a good photo actually was good. This is a lesson they wouldn’t have learned by not going for quantity.
The answer here isn’t ”Less, but Better” either. The key is that the quantity they were maximizing wasn’t simply “photo count” - it was photo count under different conditions. It’s more like Deliberate Practice. It’s selectively identifying the aspects of the process that actually deliver value, then Drilling Cycles those.
Notes
Linear, long-form notetaking is probably less effective as a learning tool than something like Visual Notetaking. If you go to a lecture and perfectly transcribe everything the professor says, you’ve been diligently taking notes. You’ve captured everything. However you’ve probably learned nothing and produced something much less valuable than if you’d Distilled the content into something more pithy, or transformed it into something else.