alt Hacker News> At semester's end, all the best photos came from the quantity group.
My parents once owned a photography studio. My stepfather often said something like, "A great photographer doesn't only take great photos; he takes many photos of various quality, and never shows anyone the bad ones."
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satyrun • last Saturday at 3:46 PM
Exactly.
If you look at a book of Picasso's drawings/paintings he has thousands of examples of half finished, complete shit.
The masterpieces are the result of picking the best output.
I think the lesson at the end of that semester is a bit muddied. It says the quantity group figured out a bunch of stuff due to multiple photos being taken, but there are a couple things we don't know:
1-Just because the single photo group only submitted one photo, they may have taken just as many as the quantity group
2-How were "best" photos determined (by prof? by class vote?)
If quality group took as many photos, then the issue is really about the subjective selection of "best" photo. The first group had 100x as many photos to choose from than the 2nd group, so it could be more about how well each person in the 2nd group was able to select best photo from their collection compared to however "best" photos were selected out of all photos.