Does Quantity Really Beat Quality?

From Scarcity and Abundance to Sufficiency

‘Why quantity beats quality...

University of Florida professor Jerry Uelsmann conducted an experiment with his film photography students, dividing them into quantity and quality groups.

?? The quantity group's grade depended on the number of images produced, while

?? the quality group's grade relied on their best individual work.

By the end of the semester, the best photos came from the quantity group, who focused on experimenting with lighting and composition rather than theorizing, ultimately gaining more practical experience.

Quantity leads to quality through experience, learning and improving.

Dr Nils Jeners (LinkedInPost)

‘These three things doubled human life expectancy in a very short period of time. One was the scientific method. The second thing was the development of the light microscope. The third piece of that was the development of antibiotics. We went from about a life expectancy of 40 to 80 inside of a generation and a half. Today we’re at a point where not only has life expectancy flattened but in many parts of the developed world it's actually declining a little bit and more importantly quality at the end of life is going down. The question is why?’

Dr Peter Attia ‘Feel Better, Move More’ podcast

Introduction

Amongst all the guff generated about (and these days generated by) Chat GPT, two quotes captured my attention; the first because I’m a photographer and the second because preventive health is an area of professional and (after suffering from Long COVID) personal interest.?

So the question they generated for me is does quantity really beat quality? I’m not convinced.

More is Better Until It Isn’t?

As a photographer old enough to use film, learning from my mistakes certainly helped me improve. Firstly, you only had 36 opportunities on a roll. Film was expensive to buy and time consuming to develop, so there was a huge incentive to analyse what was good or bad and aim to improve next time. Digital photography gives you the opportunity to take far more shots and do likewise with the benefit to see your mistakes as you shoot, but the same principle applies.?

If you look at the photo here, it was taken at an event organised by Olympus Cameras, who gave a group of us a top of the range camera, a SD card and all court access. A modern camera can easily take about 30 photos in a sequence of 2-3 seconds, but the only photo of interest is the best one so the optimal strategy is to capture the ‘decisive moment’ and nothing else.

?As I learnt how to use a camera that I’ve never used before on a sport I’ve never covered, I spent a lot of time at first taking a lot of mistimed shots. Eventually I learnt to anticipate that decisive moment (in this case when everyone is at their maximum extension/jump). This enabled me to take far less shots. Why??

However, as I improve, quantity becomes as much of a burden as a benefit. The overheads of storage and selection (the editing process) start to become costly and time consuming, and your customers aren’t really interested in seeing the quantity of your work, They are interested in seeing sufficient quantity of your highest quality.?

In this photography example the quantity for an article or a website would be a handful, but we can generalise this idea of sufficient to the following.?

There just comes a point at which everyone has more than enough and abundance starts to become more of a hindrance than a benefit. Having a 1000 shirts becomes a problem if you can’t decide which to wear in a morning. Google why Steve Jobs always wore black.?

Application to Healthcare

There are more reasons why life expectancy has doubled than Peter Attis opines, but there’s no doubt that the three reasons he cites have huge significance. The biggest gain in average life expectancy of the population is through the prevention of death in early childhood from infectious diseases. Antibiotics and vaccinations have a huge part to play in that.

If we take antibiotics, we have moved from a problem of scarcity to one of abundance. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) threatens the effective prevention and treatment of an ever-increasing range of infections. We now have to manage the use of antibiotics carefully and judge when to use them rather than reach for them as first choice.

We can even see problems with the scientific method. If we look at this amazing tweet (sorry but Space Karen screwed up the ability to embed tweets properly in other media), we can see that the global pandemic produced nearly 80K scientific papers in two years, 8X more than the total of any other subject in 70 years of medical science!

One can marvel at the speed and size of response to the pandemic but there’s also the inconvenient problem that many of those studies were unhelpful, poorly designed etc. Not only did this abundance make life difficult for healthcare professionals and medical researchers, it enabled a whole subculture of misinformation and conspiracy theorists. Were vaccinations safe? Do masks really work? This had an effect on both vaccinations and masks for COVID but has also caused a drop in vaccine uptake in other areas e.g. measles where the benefits are long proven.?

At a wider level, we can see that our modern healthcare systems are overwhelmed by chronic disease - cancer, COPD, Type 2 diabetes etc. Outside of smoking, obesity is one of the major causes of that preventable ill health. As a population, some people go hungry but most people are not short of food per se. The question is how many of us are eating sufficient, but not excess, quantities of ‘good’ freshly prepared food rather than overeating poor quality food e.g. takeaways?

The Age of Abundance?

The Industrial Revolution can be said to mark the transition from an emphasis on quality (hand made) to quantity (machine made).

Technological progress since has been largely aimed at innovation addressing scarcities of supply - access to food (fertilisers and modern farming), power (coal, gas, diesel) - or innovation to meet unmet needs - transport (rail, car, plane), basic treatment of disease and injury (surgery, antibiotics), communication etc. In order to achieve this, we have had access to what were, at the time, unlimited natural resources and almost unlimited human labour.?

We have now?transitioned in the last half century into an era where, increasingly, the larger problems are caused by abundance - too many cars, unclean power producing climate change, chronic disease over a prolonged period etc. The internet of things enables us to network hundreds of devices but opens up vulnerability to cyberattack; imagine every car of a certain model going haywire on the motorway.?

In our personal lives, we are rarely stuck for things to do with our spare time. We have an inexhaustible supply of Netflix, YouTube, Instagram, Tik Tok etc and all on our phone! Boredom has been replaced by decision fatigue.?

As humans, we’re geared towards abundance over scarcity i.e. feast over famine, so solving these kinds of problems can be trickier than ones of scarcity. The industrial revolution created jobs, wealth and, over a long period of time, better living conditions. The ‘green revolution’ involves a loss of power and influence for some countries heavily dependent on fossil fuels and the opposite for countries rich in resources like cobalt like the Congo. At a personal level, we all want to reduce carbon emissions, but we also want to fly whenever we choose and at a cheap price.?

Technology is now just affecting single industries but skills that cross all industries. While there is not a Luddite movement against AI, it is a huge cause of concern as the technology eats away at higher functioning human skills.?

The resolution of these abundance issues involving loss require deeper human skills and interactions. There’s going to be no benefits of replacing people with AI unless it starts to generate more opportunities than it destroys. While that has generally been true in the past, the speed and scale of disruption being caused by AI is quite concerning.??

Does Quantity Really Beat Quality??

In an industrial world, the use of automation enabled us to manufacture more ‘stuff’ to a higher quality but we’re starting to hit the limits of the stuff we’re producing, at least in the Western world, both in terms of natural resources and our ability to keep buying more and more.?

We should be looking at technology to solve problems of scarcity e.g. the selection of drug candidates with the greatest chance of success of developing treatments. However, we also need to better optimise scarce resources to tackle the abundance and length of ill health throughout our whole lives. (Typically adults spend around a quarter of their life living with one or more chronic conditions).?

Examples include using real world data, continuous monitoring and analytics to better predict the propensity to disease before symptoms occur and assess the merits of different types of preventive approaches for different types of people. Similarly, in other fields, we need to better optimise our use of energy, maximise the efficiency of our transport systems and cut out waste and improve our resilience to climate change problems.

In the context of today’s challenges, what we don’t need from AI and other technologies is to produce more ‘stuff’ (although I think we’re going to get it). We don’t need more LinkedIn blog posts, AI generated books or fake photographs, scientific papers etc from which we have somehow to sift the wheat from the chaff.?

So to summarise, the answer to our question is a firm no. What we need is to move away from digital Taylorism and the ideal of quantity for quantity’s sake and to optimise around a sufficient quantity of the highest quality possible i.e. move from issues of scarcity and abundance to sufficiency. In this way, not only can we still create new markets and opportunities, but we may still have an inhabitable planet on which to live on.

Until Next Time?

Pete

If you liked this article and you need help with developing unique points of view for your organisation or input into your business strategy, why not get in touch? ChatGPT can’t produce this kind of thing.