Look, I don't know where you are coming from at this point. I don't think that you are trolling, maybe this is just your style of learning. You don't share any information about yourself or your diving since you joined SB a few weeks ago, so it's hard to know how to respond. Based on many of your previous statements, it doesn't seem that you have a lot of understanding of dive physics and physiology. Maybe I'm wrong about that, hard to say.
I also started to reply to each of your points, but I just don't have the energy. As John has pointed out, each of them contains unfounded assumptions, but I'm not sure that you would accept my responses.
Yes, in general an argument from authority isn't a great way of convincing someone. You should drill down on things that you are told and try to understand the underlying principals. But at SOME point, when you are trying to learn about an insanely complicated technical field, you have to assume that the existing body of scientific knowledge is basically sound, and that we weren't all sitting around waiting for you to look at it with fresh eyes and show us the error of our ways. If Doolette and Mitchell say that based on their careers studying this problem and based on these citations from the peer-reviewed literature that IWR is good in some cases but has some risks that preclude it in others, that actually means something to me. I don't need to go back to Haldane and Boyle and Paul Bert and redo it all myself.
I learned how to dive a rebreather a few years ago. It was really complex, and I'm still constantly refining my understanding of this thing that is keeping me alive underwater. But I didn't do that by lecturing my instructors and experienced mentors and insisting that my random hypotheses, based on nothing more than guesswork with no background knowledge, must be all addressed before we can move on. I didn't insist on reverse engineering an entire field because I didn't like the standard conclusions shared by the vast majority of experts. I didn't say on day 1 of Mod 1 "I would think that 0.12 is a perfectly adequate PO2 to support life based on my understanding of mountain climbing, and I'm not going to accept the need for me to maintain a higher setpoint just because you say so".
There are a lot of very experienced divers here on ScubaBoard, and they all are happy to spend their time helping new divers learn things. I really appreciate their input. But that doesn't mean that they are obligated to type out an entire textbook on decompression physiology to address every unfounded assumption that someone posts here.
