When people lose loved ones, they often come here to vent or look for affirmation of their view of the circumstances.
Emotions run high. Discussions quickly center on possibilities... not probabilities.
The emotions aren't helpful to the discussion, but both the possibilities and probabilities are a useful learning experience for the board purposes of understanding and publicizing what sort of things can go wrong and discussing ways to avoid them, or recover from them if they do. You speak of discussing possibilities as though they were a bad thing, and, if that is your intent, I would disagree. Emotions beyond respect for involved parties and fellow posters are more likely to detract from any analysis, but may be difficult to avoid.
Unfortunately, information on an event is by it's nature, always limited, and quite often is never forthcoming due to legal restrictions. At first, limited information gives way to conjecture- which often assumes a life of its own, gaining acceptance and validity only through repetition. After the sorting out in the courts, restrictions (gag orders) may be imposed by the courts due to agreements of all the parties involved.
Our desire to understand a situation and avoid similar, unfortunately takes a back seat due to these eventual prevailing legal agreements.
Certainly, this can limit the availability of true facts for discussion, but should it curtail our right to discuss the hypotheticals of the situation? Once the news reports, often including some quotes from witnesses, are out, there is no reason why a bunch of people shouldn't be able to discuss those reports. With the exception of some here being qualified to step in as impartial expert witnesses, a discussion here doesn't need to actively involve anyone close to the "case" to be useful.
Many such original posters would be advised by legal counsel that they should never engage in a recorded interchange because they likely will make statements that can be detrimental to their impending cases.
Absolutely true. Once written, these statements can't wholly be unsaid. Interested parties would be watching such discussions and making copies if that served their purposes. Deleting them after the fact won't necessarily make them go away.
Unfortunately in our world of recreational diving, there is no CSI, NTSB or similar style reporting system that will issue facts and findings after investigation.
That's the real point of distress in any of these incidents and subsequent threads.
Having some impartial forensic analysis would get us closer to facts and probabilities at the conclusion of any event and investigation. This would be important to those with a proximate interest in any event. Since I believe that we can learn just as well from discussing possibilities, I'm not sure how critical this would be for our ability to learn from board discussions.
I was in favor of maintaining this discussion so that the lessons relating to reliance on dive professionals would be there for the less experienced to absorb. There was just too much bickering and other crap for anyone to be able to locate the useful nuggets. I wonder if it might be appropriate to have a moderator-posting-only board that would simply contain impartial summaries of these incident discussions with the critical lessons highlighted in a few hundred words rather than a few hundred posts? Let the initial discussion run in the current form for a week or two, then let someone distill a summary that would be more readable for future readers. If additional facts or theories come out thereafter, an addendum might be added to the summary, but there would be no contentious exchanges getting in the way of the lessons once they are understood and summarized.
-bob
PS - If this is inappropriate here, please remove it and no offense intended.
