It seems that in many fields (medicine, law, finance/accounting,
engineering, aviation, culinary arts, and academia-->history,
mathematics, bible studies, etc.), on-the-job perfomance requires the
practitioner to know a large number of facts. I will concede that they
must know how to use those facts to work creatively...but...there -is-
a large amount of foundational knowledge they must obtain and retain.

Can you find for me three or more references that discuss the amount
of knowledge one must know to be successful in various fields. I'm
looking for numbers...recognizing that they will be estimates. Ideal
quotes would be from authoritative sources saying something such as,
"By the time medical students graduate from medical school, they will
have learned more than one million facts." The more diverse the
professions/occupations/tasks the better.

I tip well for particularly good work.

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Request for Question Clarification by ragingacademic-ga on 15 Jun 2003 21:49 PDT

alwayscurious -

Thanks for submitting your very interesting question to our forum.

To clarify - you would like at least three such references, correct? 
Preferably, each reference would come from a different field of study/profession?

ragingacademic

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Clarification of Question by alwayscurious-ga on 15 Jun 2003 22:26 PDT

Yes, I would like at least three references, each from different
domains. The more references and/or the better the quality of those
references, the higher the tip. (I may tip 100% or more for
outstanding work.)

Here is an example of a good reference:
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~jimmyd/summaries/ericsson1995.html
"The sine qua non of skilled cognitive performance is the ability to
access large amounts of domain specific information.  For example, it
is estimated that chess masters have access to as many as 100,000
familiar configurations of chess pieces (Chase & Simon, 1973)"

This is a good reference (in my opinion) because it provides a
specific number, a reference to the original research paper, and the
figure appeared in a respectable journal.

I am hoping that similar numbers are available for the fields I
mentioned in my initial request (and the numbers are supported in some
way--not just guessed at haphazardly.)

I look forward to the results of your research!

Just as a comment, I would say that those people with the skills to
learn new information quickly or research what they need to know would
have to know a great deal less static facts than those who cannot
easily do so, accepting of course that for any professional career,
some level of competance comes from "knowing the ropes" i.e. static
facts about the operating of the tasks involved in the job at hand.