I would add that it seems common for task difficulty distribution to be skewed in various idiosyncratic ways—sufficiently common and sufficiently skewed that any uninformed generic intuition about the “noise” distribution is likely to be seriously wrong. E.g., in some fields there’s important low-hanging fruit: the first few hours of training and practice might get you 10-30% of the practical benefit of the hundreds of hours of training and practice that would be required to have a comprehensive understanding. In other fields there are large clusters of skills that become easy to learn with once you learn some skill that is a shared prerequisite for the entire cluster.
I would add that it seems common for task difficulty distribution to be skewed in various idiosyncratic ways—sufficiently common and sufficiently skewed that any uninformed generic intuition about the “noise” distribution is likely to be seriously wrong. E.g., in some fields there’s important low-hanging fruit: the first few hours of training and practice might get you 10-30% of the practical benefit of the hundreds of hours of training and practice that would be required to have a comprehensive understanding. In other fields there are large clusters of skills that become easy to learn with once you learn some skill that is a shared prerequisite for the entire cluster.