The counterintuitivity of more knowledge equating to diminished performance is an ongoing source of irritation.
Great point.
It may be counterintuitive, but it is exactly what one should expect.
Our performance is not just related to knowledge, although that is the most important thing in most circumstances.
Our performance in anything we want to be good at is a function of three things, in order of importance they are: Knowledge, practice and natural talent. You can control the last one to some extent in the real world during selection, but for training and improvement you only focus on the first two.
Practice without knowledge can lead to much wasted effort, so knowledge is foremost. Once you know a thing, you need to deliberately practice it, as distinct from simple mindless repetition. Deliberate practice is when you do a thing, analyse it afterwards, fix faults and improve, then rinse and repeat.
Here is the catch.
Suppose you enjoy fighting a certain way, but you know it is not optimal and you need to change. You know this because while you can beat 90% of pilots doing it, the other 10% punish you for it, so you know you need to do something different.
You figure it out by acquiring new knowledge. Problem is the thing you need to do needs practice so when you try it you find you are now getting punished by the original 10% along with another 20% who are still doing the wrong thing, but they are doing it way better than you are doing the right thing.
I frequently see examples of this in A2A combat. I see pilots do the wrong thing in terms of BFM/ACM/Energy management and they have been doing those things wrong for so long they do it so well it can be quite difficult to punish them for their mistakes. I won't name names, but I still always try to point those things out when I see them done by friendly adversaries.
Learning something by yourself is difficult because it isn't easy to tell if good results are due to doing the wrong thing well against someone doing the right thing badly, or if bad results are due to doing the right thing badly against someone doing the wrong thing well. Very often people will stop doing the right things because they aren't working when they just need more deliberate practice. That's why in most cases a coach or trainer is so important to help fine tune your knowledge and help analyse the faults and fix them. That's why a coach or trainer will get you to keep doing a thing even when it doesn't seem to be working because they know if you persevere it will pay off big time.
Bottom line is that new knowledge can often result in diminished performance until it has been sufficiently well practiced, particularly if you stop doing the bad stuff you were well practiced at and replace it with new good stuff you haven't practiced enough yet.
The scary thing is, how much practice we are talking about? It can be a lot. Learning something new in AH can take 5 minutes, doing it well enough to beat 90% of the other players at it could take 3 years or more. That's where the talent can help, natural talent has a big impact on the time required. If you aren't naturally gifted, it just means you need to work harder and longer to see the same results. And of course old habits die hard, and most of us just want quick results.
I was excited and surprised recently to learn something new in the DA from someone during friendly fights in a particular aircraft, not my best ride. I didn't do well. I was lucky because the new knowledge mostly required existing skills so a week or so later a return visit with the same pilot went the other way entirely. Shortly afterwards I shared that knowledge with another good pilot in this thread and no doubt that will come back to bite me in due course. For me that is just part of the fun. It's ongoing, and the hits you need to take are just part of the learning process.
Hopefully I've said something to help with any minor irritation... If not embrace it, all good things take time
Badboy
