The Only Way to Win and the Unclimbable Mountain

The jets are too loud to hear your instructor unless they are shouting.

The military appears to be a different kind of environment to me. I think if a Sargent said "good boy" to one of his men it would be a demotivater as the other men would tease and harass them as the teacher's pet. Instead, a good yelling gets the adrenaline flowing, which will sharpen the senses, and give at least a short term performance boost.

Another good TV series to check out is Curiosity on Discovery.

This real life example of the flight instructors is actually what inspired Daniel Kahneman to begin his research with Amos Tversky into heuristics, the less than accurate shortcuts we humans use to make decisions.

After researching what the flight instructors had claimed, he confirmed what they had noticed, but instead came to the conclusion that the effect was caused by availability bias and failure to account for random variables. It took him 3 years and additional studies to confirm this.

As it turns out, regression to mean is the largest factor in determining flight performance, not skill. The instructors were complimenting trainee pilots after exceptional performance, and chastising them after exceptionally bad performance. The key word here being "exceptional". It was only natural that the trainee pilots would do less exceptionally in the fullness of time; for some this meant improving, for others this meant getting worse. Exceptional events wouldn't be exceptional if they were common or frequent.

The most interesting thing about this event, which took place back in the 60's, is that the flight instructors were both correct in what they observed and incredibly wrong in their conclusions. They also tried to use their observations to disprove and ignore the scientific evidence that had come down the pike at them, which of course turned out to be absolutely correct (of course it took 3 more studies and 3 years to prove it to them).

It is now considered a cautionary tale in science to illustrate just how inaccurate human observations, conclusions, and reasoning is...and why the scientific method is needed to cut though the fog of our own ignorance.

I can't answer your questions Frank. But I can tell you that I'm probably close to 100% from the foul line to this day and it's been about 39 years since I ran the last "missed shot mile." Negative reinforcement can be an excellent teacher.

Wow, I have no idea what you just said. Is that some sort of sports lingo? If so the meaning is lost on me.