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CarlShulman comments on Learned Blankness - Less Wrong
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And here's an OB post on evidence limiting the scope and magnitude of that effect.
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.
Anna's proposal for reducing blankness seems to be useful only if the noise is systematically biased toward underestimating our ability in unfamiliar tasks.
I think how likley it is someone is to underestimating their ability in a unfamiliar task (like say plumbing or handling a computer) depends both primarily on:
Its optimal for all of us to wall off parts some parts of our lives as magic. What we would gain by expending energy to explore and optimize would not outweigh the cost. The trick is realizing that most of our lives are walled off by our non-rational subsystems or just happen stance, and systematical checking these habits to see what can be improved.
At this point I'm not sure what the best way to approach this is.