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[John Hearne]

I believe my mom and Danica Patrick have both "overlearned" the ability to drive a passenger car...While both have "over learned," there is obviously an enormous difference in their competency. Two shooters may have "overlearned" the presentation, but one with a one second and the other with a three second draw.

That's a really good example because the ability to drive is probably the domain that most people understand and have achieved mastery.

I would respond that if the goal is to drive from 123 Main St to 456 Columbus Ave during daylight, dry conditions, in low to moderate traffic and at the posted speed limit, Danica Patrick would not have a discernible advantage over your mother - she may look better while doing it though. It would only be if dropped the flag and let them go as fast as possible that Danica's advantages would manifest themselves. Overlearning's benefits can be limited to certain narrow areas within a general specialty.

This also why I don't care much about the extreme outliers like Leatham or Danica. The advantages they are enjoying are not limited to hard work. The simple ugly truth is that world class, elite athletes are different from the rest of us.

There are also clearly degrees of benefit conferred by overlearning. A B-Class shooter and a Grand Master are both competent shooters and better than most but the Grand Master will do better assuming they stay within a USPSA realm. If we made both shoot High Power competition, the advantages the Grand Master previously enjoyed would largely disappear. While the Grand Master would have the advantages of overlearning pistol shooting, it would have little carry over to High Power shooting (or skeet)

I do think that a fairer example would be this. We take your mom and a 15 year old with a learner's permit. We then give them free reins to drive that course as fast as they want. The fact that your mom was comfortable with fundamental driving skills would allow her to complete the course at speed better than the 15 year old with the learner's permit.

Your comment about overlearning to a particular standard is interesting. Earlier I said that the standards we train to tend to define our maximum reasonable performance so you're correct in that sense. I would offer that someone who shot the same POST course on a recurring weekly basis, although slower, would retain a greater percentage of their skill when aroused than a new hot-shot shooter who was gifted with a lot of twitch muscle.

The only reason I'm even asking the question is that the literature is pretty damn certain that overlearning/automaticity insulates skill from the debilitating effect of high arousal states. If there wasn't a documented advantage, I wouldn't care.

[Dagga Boy]

GJM, the "driving a passenger car" is way too "vague" to apply here. Also, your mom has over-learned driving a car a specific way, and my girlfriend, I mean Dani (little pet name) has over learned it a different way. I'll put this into your world.......the starting sequence on your 500 has a lot of variables. You can destroy the thing just starting it, so there is stress and other dynamics in the skill set. It also requires constant monitoring and analysis of a variety of inputs before you fire it. It is also condition dependent. You can probably start yours with total competence in a wide range of conditions and variables due to very regimented over learning process..........you don't want me starting it, and I am actually a ways ahead of most folks on the specifics of the 500, yet would still be at an incompetent level.


John, again you are on the money. We used to have "successful police shootings" in which most of the time the bad guys did worse than the good guys with a ton of luck involved and tons of critical errors. After a specific process of training was put into place those trained this way began getting into dominating victories in which the bad guys were crushed in a very efficient and surgical manner, including several like Scott's guy at the Mexican Embassy (who was also trained exactly the same way).

[Mr_White]

Here is my question. In this thread, there has been an implication that "overlearning" implies some level of (desirable) competence, but I am not sure this is the case. For example, I believe my mom and Danica Patrick have both "overlearned" the ability to drive a passenger car, based on the Wiki definition. While both have "over learned," there is obviously an enormous difference in their competency. Two shooters may have "overlearned" the presentation, but one with a one second and the other with a three second draw.

I don't believe having "over learned" a shooting skill is enough. Rather, you need to have "over learned" and be able to do that an acceptable standard.

That's what I was getting at earlier in saying that I thought overlearning to be a qualitative thing, separate from the level of skill that is overlearned.

I would concede that in most instances a fairly low level of technical shooting ability is required. My question is how do we make sure that we can consistently bring that minimal level of skill to the fight - rain or shine, day or night, best day or worst day. My thought is that ONE way to do this is to have a level of technical skill that is accessible during periods of high arousal. As best I can determine, the skills that are accessible under high levels of arousal are overlearned to the point of automaticity.

This is where I think good old fashioned 'tactical training' does well - emphasis on all that square range stuff - threat ID and assessment, draw and hit, hit from ready, keep the gun running, basic use of cover, post-shooting procedure, incorporate movement into all of it, do it in the rain, in the sun, in the dark, with a flashlight, eventually one handed, etc. The stuff that comprises the 'multitasking/serial tasking square range dance', and to me, should basically comprise a large portion of a person's initial defensive handgun training.

I think then taking those base skills and dealing with more difficult circumstances further increases the robustness of the skills - the automaticity - add artificially induced stress, exertion, artificial penalty for failure, the scenario/FOF training modality, as well as greater spatial complexity, serial tasking, and time pressure as found in practical shooting competition.

That's my answer to your question in bold.

To further things from there, a person might want to sharpen their skill execution to highest level they can muster.

I won't argue. There are two aspects to risk assessment - probability and severity. The probability of needing to solve a high level technical shooting problem in the field are low. However, that is not the only metric we use. When you consider the severity of the penalty for not having a high level of technical shooting skill, it can be extreme and to me negates much of the probability arguments. To summarize - it's not the odds, it's the stakes.

Hear, hear.

I'd also offer that perhaps, we don't see a lot of high level of technical shooting in the LE world. Is this because there is no need for it or because very few people can pull it off? What about the LAPD guy, trained by Scottie Reitz, that shot the hostage taker at the Mexican Embassy some years back? If we had more cops in the field with that skill set (does anyone argue that there are lots of those guys out there) would be see it more?

Totally agree with you that low levels of skill, whether by LE or private citizen, can become a self-fulfilling prophecy with regard to the perceived likely difficulty of the problem and the skills a person can expect to have when it's 'for real.'

As an aside, if you want a really interesting domain with lots of carryover, take aviation and add guns and missles to it - aerial combat. I've found a lot of interesting material in this realm. It's not longer published but the book "The Ace Factor" (recommended by Ken Good) was fascinating.

Any succinct insights you can share? Not asking you to recount the whole book or anything...

This also why I don't care much about the extreme outliers like Leatham or Danica. The advantages they are enjoying are not limited to hard work. The simple ugly truth is that world class, elite athletes are different from the rest of us.

I don't know, I maybe come down more on the nurture side of the argument than you do. I think GMs, even champion ones, are much more made than born. Although I would agree that that question is largely moot for our purposes here, since even if GMs are made and not born, very few, especially in aggregate at the institutional or general public level, will have the motivation and resource to reach that level of skill.

[John Hearne]

Any succinct insights you can share? Not asking you to recount the whole book or anything...

In a sad statement on my nature, I'm pulling out my notes that are electronic and easy to cut and paste. If it's in quotes, it's the authors words, if not its my thoughts. This is what stuck out:

• “A tiny minority run up a high score, primarily at the expense of the less gifted.”
• 5% account for 40% of victories
• Very determined and excellent distance vision
• Marksmanship is found among them, the best shoot better, difference between the high and low scoring aces; (when it all comes down to it, can you physically put rounds on target?)
• Training – helps to a degree
• Flying skill – few aerobats ever became an ace, no test pilots; aces as average flyers
• “the most successful fighter pilots were men of first class judgement.”
• Luck – essentially a defensive quality linked with survival and much less a factor in the attack
• Determination – high degree of control of fear
• Aggression – only useful when controlled, otherwise a danger
• Distance vision and coordination
• Coordination = natural athleticism?
• “A long-sighted young man with light colored eyes, on the short side, with good physical co-ordination, quick reflexes, and a naturally good shot.”
• No average pilots – just aces and turkeys
• “Only one pilot in fifteen has a better than even chance of surviving his first decisive combat, but having done so, after five such encounters, his survival probability had increased by a factor of twenty.”
• Situational awareness – “the ability of the pilot to keep track of events and foresee occurrences in the fast-moving, dynamic scenario of air warfare.”
• “He who can handle the quickest rate of change survives.”
• SA has no relation to flying ability or experience but the right sort of experience helps.
• 4 forms of friction: 1) less than perfect intelligence 2) psychological pressure 3) physical stress 4) demoralizing effect of unexpected
• Survival instinct as counterproductive (in non-natural environment)
• “Shock action or surprise is in fact the dominant factor in air combat” – the attacker is firmly grounded in cognition and the defender must struggle to remain there
• If you can’t win, survive – importance of opting out
• “The value of surprise and shock action”
• Importance of knowing what the pilot himself can do with his weapons
• Side with the biggest numbers win in wars of attrition; wars won by the numerically inferior are won quickly
• The dual factors of surprise and shock action can be seen to be decisive
• Dominant factor in air campaigns is pilot quality. Equipment advantage marginal at best
• “It has long been held that aces are born and not made. There is an element of truth in this, but it is not the whole story.”
• 3 parts: what he can see, what he can do, what he can hit (marksmanship is 1/3)
• Combination of courage, aggression, caution, instinct
• Being attacked while one thinks they are on the offensive is very hard to recover from. – a major reorientation
• Attack is the best means of defense
• In some men, all these qualities appear to be present from the outset. In others, some qualities are present from the start while others develop slowly
• The difficult part was teaching them what to look for.
• The quicker a pilot became accustomed to “seeing” everything that happened beside him…
• Importance of building observe – esp with a mentor (fto?)
• Alertness – practice made perfect although a prerequisite was to live long enough to gain the necessary practice.
• Marksmanship – good flying never killed anyone
• Good pilots spent time zeroing their guns and checking ammo for reliability
• “This, like many things, could be learned.” (So learn the things you can)
• “I simply missed that Hun because I did not at that time possess that little extra determination that makes one get one’s sight on a Hun and makes one’s mind decide that one is going to get him or know the reason why.”
• ***Attack to help to overcome fear ***
• Shooting ability and determination ranked over flying ability
• Increased speeds compressed the time frames of fights making awareness even more important
• Tuck’s ability to kill from incredibly long distances - marksmanship
• Sixth sense – making correct deductions from incredibly sparse bits on information
• "Whilst shooting, think of nothing else, brace the whole of your body, have both hands on the stick, concentrate on your sight ring."
• “The object of the exercise as with all sets of instructions, is to give the learner, whose SA level is nil in most cases, as set of guidelines to enable him to survive long enough to commence the learning process.”
• Pre-war training - “Seemed content to teach us to fly the Spitfire but not to fight it.”
• “Our problem was how to get through half a dozen fights”
• Hartmann – slow start then figured it out, remarkable for dealing with combat stress
• Even very experienced veterans can be taken aback by an aggressive counter attack
• Peace makes high attrition level unacceptable in training
• “How do you train for the most dangerous game in the world by being as safe as possible?”
• Paradox of selection – looking for those who do well organizationally versus can fight
• If SA could be quantified, it would trump most everything
• The fighters were being built for peacetime use; not for war, and the pilots followed the same pattern.
• Soviets – as for training, they know and accept that people occasionally get killed; they try to minimize it, but not at the expense of realism.
• To keep the workload within manageable limits, flying and maneuvering the fighter had to become second nature.
• "The aim, through constant training and practice is for the pilot to achieve a high level of proficiency. This is analogous to professional sportsmen, particularly in the area of team ball. Like air combat, just a few of them are outstanding in their chose sport, the ace perhaps. No one knows what really makes them stand out against their fellows; it is equally certain that they have their spells of being off-form, but basically, they have flair. Other train and practice just as hard but cannot obtain the same results, except perhaps on rare occurrences. But no matter how hard the fighter pilot trains, there remains the indefinable something that makes the difference between being an ace and merely being good."
• "They will be the ones with the mysterious ability to extract, retain, and project more from the available information than their fellows. They will be the ones with the ace factor.”
• “we can only relate what we have done that worked effectively a good percentage of time in the past, and hope that these basic set of circumstances aid by forming a general background of knowledge from which you can draw instinctively when the chips are down.”
• Two good aerial training fights a week at minimum to maintain proficiency
• Assume every pilot you meet is the world’s best and maneuver your aircraft accordingly until he shows you he is not.
• Actual leadership experience beats years in service

[Mr_White]

Thank you!

[Dagga Boy]

The nuggets and correlations to gunfighting in the above are staggering!

[John Hearne]

First, Dude, thanks for helping me think these things out.

I think then taking those base skills and dealing with more difficult circumstances further increases the robustness of the skills - the automaticity - add artificially induced stress, exertion, artificial penalty for failure, the scenario/FOF training modality, as well as greater spatial complexity, serial tasking, and time pressure as found in practical shooting competition.

I would tend to disagree. Automaticity is the result of the quality of the motor programs that have been practiced. The best way to build that quality to practice the skill in isolation and then add complexity. Adding complexity is valuable because it builds confidence in your skills but there isn't anything that suggests it will improve automaticity. I am not saying that the complexity is unimportant - confidence is crucial but the complexity won't improve the skill performance.

I don't know, I maybe come down more on the nurture side of the argument than you do. I think GMs, even champion ones, are much more made than born. Although I would agree that that question is largely moot for our purposes here, since even if GMs are made and not born, very few, especially in aggregate at the institutional or general public level, will have the motivation and resource to reach that level of skill.

I tended along the same lines and bought the 10,000 hour rule. The ugly fact seems to be that two people can do the same 10,000 hours and arrive at very different skill levels. There seems to be a clear synergy between your base composition and your ability to learn. The people with better base composition will learn more for the same effort in practice. Even if they just gain a .001% advantage for each hour of practice, at the end they are way ahead. The advantages seem to compound like interest.

Vision seems to be important in a lot of sports. Jelly Bryce swore that he saw every bullet he fired. I suspect that he did but very few of us have the visual acuity and see speed to do that. I heard an interview with Robby Leatham and he commented that at 50 years old he could still see the 45 caliber bullet holes in the target at 50 yards - that is visual acuity several orders of magnitude off the average and is really amazing considering that visual acuity tends to decrease after 30. I suspect that most anyone with a reasonable base could make GM but their ability to be competitive at the top levels just won't be there.

If I had multiple millions of dollars, I would love to study top shooters in the same fashion that top athletes in other sports have been studied. Epstein references a world class kayaker that could not win at the top levels. When their muscle composition was checked, they were very biased towards fast twitch muscle versus slow twitch. This kayaker switched from longer races to short ones and became absolutely dominant.

[GJM]

OK, here is my theory as regards the relationship between technical skills you possess and technical skills you can deliver in a lethal encounter.

1) You start out with your own level of technical shooting skills. These skills can be measured using a variety of tests.

2) During a first lethal encounter, there will be a extremely large variation in what percentage of "calm" technical shooting skills can be attained -- ranging from 0 percent of your technical skills to 100 percent of your calm technical skills. This is short hand for all bets are off for the first incident. I would't bet on research being able to successfully predict how someone does the first time. I believe a lot of the variation is related purely to how different individuals are wired.

3) After that first lethal encounter, there will be a narrower delta between calm technical ability and the percentage of your technical ability you can deliver in a crisis. There is fertile ground for research in studying both how to optimize technical training to deliver the highest percentage of calm skills in a crisis and what psychological characteristics are likely associated with your ability to deliver a high percentage of your calm technical skills.

After the range of performance loss between calm and crisis skills has been determined through research, the bean counters can then decide what level of crisis skills they are willing to pay for, and then the trainers can design programs to train to a level, that after deducting for the average crisis discount, they are satisfied with.

[1slow]

John,
Thanks loads this is really helpful!

[Chemsoldier]

• 3 parts: what he can see, what he can do, what he can hit (marksmanship is 1/3)

A lot of good material but this one really strikes me as one of the biggest take-aways.