Time to humble myself.
To achieve the rate of failure described in this clip I'm going to have to shorten the distance, shorten the sling and define a larger target than I'm used to aiming for.
Anyone else want to join in an compare results and timeline?

https://youtu.be/81shDwRwD8U?si=P4BhlWfZrJlbYVos

my problem with big targets has always been that I can't carry them to practice. I might be using a 20cm target as a reference and visualize a balearic target around it. I think a hit on the visualized diana but a miss on the actual 20cm target can be taken as a success by the mind. I think the reverse can also be done, using a big target and visualising a smaller point on it and feeling like everything except a center hit is a failure. but using a smaller target and visualizing a bigger one has a better resolution than the reverse.
before a competition I would train at the same conditions as the comp. if i could

P.S. :
same applies to 100m practice or further, hitting the vertical is a small success, being within 2m front or back of the target is a bigger success, 0.5m almost feels like success.

The paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12552-4.pdf

I have only scanned it but am sceptical that you should take 15% at face value, at least not applied to all endevours. The results appear to be generated primarily from neural nets (AI) and then applied to a monkey learning model. That said, there's a lot to explore here and an interesting conversation to have about how we train in slinging and measure success in training.

I will say in slinging pretty much every throw you make can be assessed in terms of deviation from desired trajectory, and not just a binary hit/miss. I think we can make a differentiation here between success/failure rate and feedback generally. In this paper success/failure IS the feedback, but I don't believe this is the case for almost all complex real world endevours.

Think how differently you are likely to train if you were placed in a dark environment and could only hear the results of your throws- quadro, diana or miss (a bit like this years international!). I think in this case I would prefer to tune my hit rate to be higher, balancing out positive and negative feedback. I certainly wouldn't choose to aim for a tiny target and only get feedback for perfect throws with everything else categorised as a miss. However, for slinging in normal conditions? ...the approach is different. If I can see where my shot goes, I can aim for a point and get graded feedback on every single shot. The choice of diana and quadro size (effectively the definition of success and failure) may have psychological impacts, but it doesn't actually provide much better feedback than aiming at a point on a wall and seeing how far off your shots land.

In a sense I think this paper is more about the quality and balance of feedback, rather than whatever we define as success/failure.

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Morphy wrote on Nov 19^th, 2023 at 5:54pm:


To be fair, I did soda cans for years... I'm not where I want to be in terms of consistency (and that is a pretty small target). I think that some sort of target that is bigger than a soda can but smaller than a balearic cuadro (120cm) is probably a good happy medium for being able to see and track progress. I think tracking progress is part of the mental battle. Because if you just aim at a small target, you forget the hundreds of misses and only remember the hits. Then the next day, you could be much more consistent, but not hit your small target, but feel like you've been a failure.   

I certainly think that this is worth a try and think that having multiple people try it and report back their results is the only way to determine whether or not something along these lines (i.e. the 85% method) is going to be effective. 

So, come on, Morphy, don't be a sourpuss, make your target bigger! (and feel like a superhero in the process!)

I’ve been thinking about this one for a bit, trying to recall my learning curve from absolute noob to where I’m at.

I’ve used a variety of different targets, slings and ammo; and each of those seem to affect my success in some way.

I went from a point where just getting in front of me was success, and got to where I’m at now where I can hit 2.5 ft board 3/10 times at 13m. (Not great i know  )

I noticed my consistency slowly drawing in, instead of randomly missing, I now notice when I do miss said board, it’s always either 1-3” above or to the left. I realised this when instead of aiming for the “Diana”, (2.5”) i aimed to the right of the board and got a clean hit. I’m trying to still train myself to hit where I look, but it’s slow progress. I think being able to quantify your improvement,, whether it’s small or large is more important, as you’ll be able to focus on what to adjust; instead of just missing or hitting.

Interesting stuff though guys!

Blindsquirrel

I didn't get the reasoning. why is the diana 50 and not 30cm with 1m square? and why 13m and not 20/30m.

I have used degrees to track practice but it's very impractical because you get feedback much later. that's how I would do it scientifically though

I think the huberman podcast has a lot of good advice which are more important than this "15%". I do wonder how they came up with the 120cm probably has to do something with 4ft which ends up similar size to the archery target.