"Piece of Paper Syndrome"

[captain]

In 1984, George Orwell described the concept of Doublethink, which I will slightly modify to describe the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in one's head simultaneously and believe both to be true.

Thought One: Scuba is a simple and safe process that can be taught by anyone with any experience to any new diver without any formal training in instruction.

Thought Two: Scuba is a highly complex and dangerous activity, and modern instruction is so bereft of technique and content that students who learn from poorly trained instructors are in constant danger of losing their lives.

And somewhere in the middle lies the truth.

 

[Thalassamania]

In 1984, George Orwell described the concept of Doublethink, which I will slightly modify to describe the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in one's head simultaneously and believe both to be true.

Thought One: Scuba is a simple and safe process that can be taught by anyone with any experience to any new diver without any formal training in instruction.

Thought Two: Scuba is a highly complex and dangerous activity, and modern instruction is so bereft of technique and content that students who learn from poorly trained instructors are in constant danger of losing their lives.

I thought I said something like that a while back:

...
Crap ... scuba is permitted to remain a self regulating sport due to a rather weird and self contradictory phenomena, first because it's pretty damn hard to hurt yourself in the situation that most people dive in (but even so a sizable number seem to scare the bejezus out of themselves and never dive again) and second because the general non-diving public "knows" that it is dangerous as hell and so assumes that anyone in their right mind who takes it up actually knows the risks.

So what's the reality? Scuba is a fairly simple and safe process, most of the time. For the kind of diving that most people do, 30 feet in warm water led about by an instructor (for both of their incredibly short diving careers), frankly a short pamphlet, like the one that used to come with Healthways' early regulators, is likely be sufficient.

On the other hand, some diving (especially that with a physical or physiological ceiling) can be very demanding and exacting, and is best learned from a highly experienced practitioner. In the old days there were few instructors, but there were practitioners who were also good teachers. Today there are lots of instructors, few of whom are good practitioners, and even fewer who are capable of doing much more than turning on the video machine and making sure that a student can preform a fin pivot, while waiting for their short time in the industry to expire so that they can do on to try a different career.

So when you put that whole ball of wax together, my suggestion is: if you want to learn to handle something more that tropical, lead-me-around diving, you need to be rather selective about whom you study with ... and as far as I can tell, when you run down the list of qualities that the individual should have ... a recreational diving instructor card is near the bottom of the list; and a shiny new recreational diving instructor card is most likely a contraindication.

The problem with your doublethink example is that you missed what the actual doublethink is: the pretense that what is taught in todays' recreational classes actually prepares you dive in "local" conditions such as those found on the North Pacific and North Atlantic Coasts, even when that is where the training is conducted.

 

[Adam Grose]

Hmmmm.... I once saw a Divemaster that I would have SWORN was an Orangutan.

I took it upon myself to contact Padi regarding this matter and they assured me that, no matter how much paper work was submitted, they would be unwilling to instructor-certify a chimp. They stated their policy was very specific on this matter and that "Rescue Diver" was the highest level of certification possible for a chimp, or any other non-human primate. You should, in the future, make a more thorough attempt to have your facts straight before making such a claim.