Intentional vs Unintentional Practice
also Deliberate vs incidental practice
The distinction between deliberately directed practice that keeps improving a skill and incidental repetition that automatizes whatever you happen to do, errors included.
Critical Fallibilism observes that practice does not have to be intentional to have effects: any activity you repeat enough automatizes the way you currently do it. Reading for fun makes you a better reader; a beginner improves just by doing the activity. The danger is that automatization is indifferent to quality. Repetition cements your errors as reliably as your successes, turning mistakes into low-attention habits that are then hard to notice and harder to fix.
This is why CF treats unintentional practice as a reliable cause of plateaus. New readers improve, but experienced readers usually stop improving from reading more books, because they keep repeating what they already do. The first hundred repetitions teach you something; the thousandth typically does not. Intentional practice escapes this by adding a goal and a way to judge success, then deliberately varying the activity, advancing to something harder, and pushing limits to locate the breakpoints between success and failure.
CF’s specific take ties practice to error correction and resource budgets: the point of practice is to raise your success rate and free up conscious attention, so improvement requires feedback, not mere volume. Going through motions without that feedback loop resembles cargo culting the form of practice. Even unintentional practice can be reclaimed in retrospect — you can identify what you got better at and then practice it deliberately, sometimes via deliberate relearning of habits formed badly the first time.