Mr Chattertons Self Reliance Article...

Please register or login

Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.

Benefits of registering include

  • Ability to post and comment on topics and discussions.
  • A Free photo gallery to share your dive photos with the world.
  • You can make this box go away

Joining is quick and easy. Log in or Register now!

Obviously Mr. Porker didn't subscribe to the DIR philosophy and keep himself in excellent physical shape causing the rest of his "team" who came prepared to use the appropriate tool and deployed the dynamite to blow Mr. Porker up. Hence "Doing it Right".

One could read into that a little further and say Mr. Porker was a "Stroke" and deserved to "DIE".
Whoa....I think it suggests to Kantian inclined divers, that the Porker could not be killed to save themselves--this would be related in some degree to DIR mindsets, except as you rightly point out, the fat guy would have been a Rule number one violation....however, once in the team, the duty was to NOT kill him.

Hume was the one saying the Porker could be killed to save the others, as would have been also agreed on by those of Utilitarianist persuasion ( greatest good for the greatest number).

One actually has a great deal of reading on this to do, if they want to actually pair the ethical dillemas of the ages, with modern day dive planning..:wink:
And as you just brought up, this IS what has happened in this enormous argument/thread on Scubaboard.
 
There seem to be a lot of references in this thread to the "two sides". What exactly are the two sides? It appears that GUE/UTD/DIR are one side, but what is the other side? all other divers?
 
John, that reminds me of a very amusing experience I had in college. We were studying a book, and the author was attending our class. The instructor gave a lecture on interpreting symbolism in the book. At the end of the lecture, the author took the podium and the first thing he said was, "Wow, I never intended to put any of that in there . . . "

Communication is often imperfect, and it's worst when the perspectives of author and reader are wildly divergent, so that everything is interpreted quite differently.

Believe it or not, it is very possible for an author of fiction to not understand all that is in his own work. I knew an author very well who firmly believed that when he was writing in a state of high excitement, with a Zen-like flow of ideas coming out, his subconscious mid would produce all sorts of good stuff that he might not realize was there. He gave me some examples of really great symbolism in one of his novels that he had no idea about until someone else pointed them out. But they were definitely there.

I was going over a short story draft with a female student in a creative writing class once, and I got the uncomfortable feeling that she had put in some very erotic symbolism. I was quite flustered, and I was wondering if I should mention it. I finally said something like, "I see some symbolism in XYZ, and I am wondering if you intended it." She was at first puzzled, and then her eyes went wide with horror as her face turned beet red. No, it was not intentional, but it was certainly there.

In those cases we are talking about fiction rather than an attempt to explain a point of view clearly.

---------- Post added March 20th, 2013 at 01:58 PM ----------

John,

I disagree. I think people read what they wanted to read from the article. John was immediately labeled a buddy hater, and the brew-ha-ha started. Considering all of the positive comments on John's blog site and facebook page (and believe me, we let all of the comments through except spam posts, even anything negative) it seems that there was a pretty good understanding of the post, except here on SB.

I am not sure what you are disagreeing with.

I really don't understand his point. I guess that means I have a reading comprehension problem.

When I was in graduate school, the English graduate students had a workshop with WilliamS. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch and an icon of the beat generation. In the reception that followed, Burroughs and I had a conversation over bourbon about some of his ideas. It was uncomfortable for me, and more so for him, because I was challenging some of what he had said. (I thought some of it was nuts, frankly.) Later, all the other students were raving about what a genius he was and how much they admired his thinking. As the professor pushed the discussion, though, it became pretty obvious that pretty much nobody really understood what he was saying. It was certainly very chic to admire him and his ideas, though.
 
There seem to be a lot of references in this thread to the "two sides". What exactly are the two sides? It appears that GUE/UTD/DIR are one side, but what is the other side? all other divers?

There are several classical positions on this, as the Cave story describes. On scubaboard is was mostly the DIR/GUE/UTD or Kantians, versus the "Every man for himself" crowd....which does NOT tie in to the Solo diving crowd with any useful correlation--as a great many solo divers would rush to assist the diver at iminent peril.

---------- Post added March 20th, 2013 at 04:15 PM ----------

I think 10x is achievable, given sufficient panic.

NOAA list 5x under heavy workload. Heavy workload is still controlled breathing,...'out of breath', rather than hyperventilating and/or severe CO2 hit.

Extracted / Interpolated From NOAA Diving Manual, 2001:
Work Level.............................. Typical Swim....Typical O2
Description__ _____RMV, lpm__ __Speed,Knots_ _Cons., Lpm__
Light..................... 22.5........ ...... 0.6............... 1.1
Moderate............... 40.0 ...............1.0............... 1.8
Moderately Heavy.... 62.5............... 1.2............... 2.5
Heavy.................... 75.0............... 1.4............... 3.0
Extremely Heavy...... 90.0............... 1.6 ...............3.5

Further to that; this excerpt from the Diver Medical Technician Manual (Dive Bell, Australia):
View attachment 150509
(is attached/uploaded images not working?)

From 'WHY US DIVERS DIED IN 1991' by Ben Davidson (SPUMS Journal Vol 25 No.2 1995):




...so, even erring on the moderate (and I do believe it is moderate)... how does that 'bullet-prood' gas-sharing plan deal with a 5x SAC rate increase?
Many of us on this discussion have been in life or death situations. In each situation I have ever encountered, the breathing rate went down when it needed to, because there was a danger in air supply till surfacing. You can force skip breathing AND change/LOWER exertion, until you pull the breathing rate to where it needs to be....and start your whole zen thing ASAP...I think this goes to chosing who you buddy with, and in choosing not to be on a tech dive on a boat with divers LIKELY to run stupidly OOA to the degree you are suggesting. If they are self reliant, and diving in a team, this level of brain-shut-down and poor behavior should never happen.

In an ascent scenario--headed for the deco stop above, there is no work load. A diver prone to panicking should not be on this tech dive. Anyone else should be able to have a manifold rip apart, lose gas, and after getting the long hose of a buddy within less than 30 seconds, they should be at a heart rate of under 130 and dropping in the next minute. After 5 minutes, they should be under 100 bpm, as they are not doing anything, and they should have gotten their wits about them within the first 20 seconds of getting air.

If this scenario is not a tech dive, but just a recreational profile, and you came upon a clueless wonder that was OOA and freaked, you are going to have plenty of gas to get them to the surface, even if it means reverting to the old Navy tables that allowed 60 foot per minute ascent and no stop. It is a life and death issue, and you DO have the gas for this, even at 10X breathing rates. This is not a DIR versus anything....this is what your personal ethics are.... I tend to agree with Kant's position on most ethical issues, including diving scenarios.

So Devon, when are you going to start teaching an "Ethics in Diving" Course? There can be Recreational Ethics, and Technical Ethics...and Cave ethics :)
 
Last edited:

Two things are conveniently omitted from your parable. First, the responsibility bourn by the fatty, for knowingly entering the cave with great difficulty despite knowing the same issue would arise during a time-limited egress...and then staying until close to time to leave; those decisions placed the group in danger purely to benefit his sense of curiosity. Consequently, the universal principal may be stated more narrowly and thus escape Kant’s argument: an life may be ended by an otherwise innocent person or group as the sole means of escape from an assuredly fatal trap knowingly created and aggravated by the owner of the life without sufficient cause.

Second, as a post-script, this (“Had I persisted, they may have also taken my life and
still killed Scott to save their own. There was truly nothing I could have done
to save him.&#8221:wink: doesn’t gibe with the milquetoast’s earlier willingness to actively end two innocent lives as well as her own simply to assuage her conscience. If she was willing to die and kill to avoid killing, then she should have been willing to resist to the point of forcing her friends to kill her even if the likely outcome was merely her death occurring moments before the fatty’s (perhaps they could have used her dead weight to tamp the charge). It might have delayed them long enough for the fatty to live; it might have forced them to have second thoughts; it might have resulted in her unlikely success.
 
There seem to be a lot of references in this thread to the "two sides". What exactly are the two sides? It appears that GUE/UTD/DIR are one side, but what is the other side? all other divers?

I see it as Ed's vs the world....BTW I'm happy Ed lost...

It's not about an agency, it's about common sense.
 
I see it as Ed's vs the world....BTW I'm happy Ed lost...

It's not about an agency, it's about common sense.

I think it is clearly not Eds vs the world, since both sides are competent divers. Furthermore, I am not happy Ed lost, I think it is unfortunate although inevitable.
 
I think it is clearly not Eds vs the world, since both sides are competent divers. Furthermore, I am not happy Ed lost, I think it is unfortunate although inevitable.

Common sense vs none....Ed was not a competent diver, Ed was the definition of a stroke and took himself out before he could do any more harm to others.
 
Common sense vs none....Ed was not a competent diver, Ed was the definition of a stroke and took himself out before he could do any more harm to others.

I was asking about the "two sides" involved in the discussion in this thread. I think you may have misinterpreted my post a while back, unless you are suggesting that some of he participants in this thread are incompetent divers.
 

Back
Top Bottom