Arrogance and humility among divers

[MXGratefulDiver]

That is true of many or most skills--a dive course not only cannot teach what every condition is like throughout the world, it should not do that. Why fill students' heads with information they may never use, will likely forget, and will have time to learn it should the need arise? For example I did not do a single dive in conditions where the tide made one iota of difference until I had more than 800 dives and visited in your neck of the woods. When I arrived, I learned from locals what I needed to know about diving with the tides, information that should be taught to anyone doing their OW class there. In contrast, we go over diving at altitude with every dive class in Colorado, something a Seattle-area diver may never have to think about.

While PADI encourages dive instructors to train skills specific to your dive conditions, they do not "require" it, as you stated. No agency does. I gave you an example, which I deal with regularly now that I'm dedicating more time to mentoring recently certified divers. Pretty much the default circumstance is that they all know they should dive with a buddy, but none of them were ever taught the requisite skills to actually do it. And you just provided another classic example ... OW students in our area rarely ever learn how to plan dives using tide or current charts, even though as you say it's pretty much a requirement for diving here. An OW instructor can completely ignore that topic and certify a diver completely within agency standards ... PADI's or any other agency's standards. New divers learn that skill by taking a seminar ... like the one my friend Fritz Merkel provides fairly regularly ... which is always done outside the framework of an agency class, usually at dive club meetings or at someplace like the Dive Expo. At best what they'll get from their OW instructor is some mention that they should learn that stuff, but I'm not aware of any current OW instructor in my area that actually teaches it. Certainly it's not an agency requirement.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

I agree, that you cannot teach everything. And the more you try to cram in the more likely it is they will loose sight of what is the most important thing to remember.
Information heard once and then not seen or used again often disappears within a couple of years, if not less, time. I, and anyone else who teaches for while, can easily give you a few thousand personal examples.

... but I'm not talking about teaching everything ... just the skills you need to know in order to be proficient in the area you dive in. Every agency has language to that effect in their requirements ... but their requirements are sufficiently vague that a dive instructor intent on cutting corners can do so without ever teaching those things, and do so within the agency standards. Since most dive shops sell training as a loss leader, the motivation to cut corners is inherent in their business model.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

I know the person who for years was the only GUE instructor in Hawaii, and she gave me a rec pass 1st time out. Though admittedly it was not in Hawaii, maybe it’s an island thing.

Mer? I had the pleasure of diving with her in Florida a few years back. Seems like someone who'd be an amazing instructor ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

Great post and yes, it's a serious issue in our sport.

I don't really have a good answer for you. I've had similar experiences.

I can only speak for myself but I found diving a lot less "political" when I was just learning. I made maybe my first 600 dives (first 10 years or so) blissfully unaware of the opinions of others. I had my group of friends, we went diving, we had fun.

Then I discovered the internet. For the first time I saw divers critiquing each others skills. It happened on un-moderated forums. Some good information was exchanged but there was a LOT of **** talking and a surprising number of threads devolved into discussions about politics and guns. In that time I certain discussion even ended in my receiving what I believed was a very credible death threat because I disagreed with someone.

Since then the politics have remained. I joined scubaboard in 2002 IIRC and the DIR wars were still smoldering. I think that the DIR wars did two things to our sport.

1) It made a large number of active divers aware of a new paradigm for safety and equipment configuration
and
2) It created a vast rift between like minded individuals.

DIR made arrogance OK. In fact, DIR made arrogance the norm in the mid to late 1990's. I would submit that during the DIR wars George Irvine was single-handedly responsible for alienating more divers than any other individual in the history of diving. He normalized arrogance as being equivalent to being right and he modeled a highly dysfunctional form of communication. The damage was severe in the least.

The flip side, however, is that he established, for the very first time, a coherent set of best practices in diving that we had never had before (or since).

The problem was that it was black and white. Either you were DIR or you were not DIR. At some point I even heard that "DIR divers never die, they just become strokes". There was little to no constructive dialogue possible between the DIR "community" and everyone else. To some extent this is still going on although the pressure on the community has been reduced a lot.

In my personal experience I was one of those divers who wanted to take the good and leave the bad about DIR, especially having come off the heals of the DIR wars. In my local community that was nonnegotiable. Conflicts arose as I tried to discuss the possibility of a middle-road and eventually I was labeled a stroke... "the UBER-stroke" because I dared to try starting a dialogue about it. I was ostracized and many very hurtful (and untrue) things were posted on the internet about me. This was the first time I really felt discriminated against due to arrogance. It was also the first time when I realized that scuba diving had been politicized by DIR.

Meanwhile on scubaboard we were locked in battle about "agency bashing". A new kind of arrogance had emerged, namely, which agency was best...... There were differences but people were making severe value judgments about those differences. I think the high point was when one of the directors (or soon to be directors) of CMAS came on scubaboard and posed as "just another instructor" and spent a year or more tearing PADI down.... while those of us who had any energy left corrected him time after time after time time after time after time time after time after time time after time after time

To no avail. This was the ultimate arrogance about agencies, if you ask me. GUE did their own thing and their message was not always easy to hear but this CMAS guy is the one who put the arrogance into agency bashing.

Thankfully CMAS directorate made him stop so at this point in time we have a PAX-SCUBA.

GUE is still doing their own thing. in DIR the politics are still strong but the best practices are much more accessible to the general public than in the past and agency bashing isn't being done at the executive level anymore....

To my way of thinking we had 10 or so bad years but that we are now profiting more from those years more than we suffer.

R..

My first exposure to the GUE happened about the same time I joined ScubaBoard ... but the source was local. My ex-wife and I were doing a dive at a local site and noticed a couple of fellows with some gear that looked different than what we were using. So my wife asked them what it was. Rather than answer, they simply snickered, told us we were accidents waiting to happen, and advised us to "ditch the snorkel". We later discovered they were part of a larger group of GUE divers who met regularly to dive this site, and that they had a reputation for being vocal to OW students about how badly they were being trained. The rest of the dive community referred to them as "the posse".

Fast forward 15 years ... only one of those fellows is even still diving. The rest are now off being "the best" at other recreational activities, and I don't doubt that they're still exhibiting the same attitudes in those sports as they did with scuba diving.

I don't think that GUE, in and of itself, encourages arrogance ... I think rather that it attracts the sort of personality that's prone to it ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[Wookie]

Whatever else they are, they tend to have mad skillz.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

Whatever else they are, they tend to have mad skillz.

Mostly ... in hindsight, many of those posse guys were relatively new divers, and by GUE standards they weren't very good.

People sometimes lose sight of the fact that Fundies is pretty much an entry-level class ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[MaxBottomtime]

One thing to remember is that George Irvine does not hold a GUE cert. He was the most vocal proponent for DIR, for good and bad.
I first got involved in the DIR wars when rec.scuba was the big thing, a couple of years before scuba BBS were around. GI was the main instigator, but there were a couple of guys desperately trying to be his clones. One held roost on Diver.net for years and later became the moderator on the DIR forum at Scubaboard. His rants were epic. Most were deleted by the owner of each site he was on.

After the wars forced a split in the DIR world and UTD was formed the internet snipes seemed to be directed more at each other than at "strokes". A few years later newer divers would take the Fundies course and post the same twelve page report on various boards. It began with "I didn't know how bad I was until...I got my butt kicked the first day...I once was blind, but now I see". They would then encourage others to join them. Their internet tactics were more of an Amway or Jehovah's Witness style than the insults hurled years before. Still, to this day I tend to ignore posts that use terms such as trim, like minded divers and standard gases.

 

[gypsyjim]

Mostly ... in hindsight, many of those posse guys were relatively new divers, and by GUE standards they weren't very good.

People sometimes lose sight of the fact that Fundies is pretty much an entry-level class ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

Quite true.
Fundies can be a great skill building class, and one that I highly valued, but it is only a gatekeer, or entry level class that is just a first step into the more technical level training.
A Fundies grad is not yet a "technical diver", but has only been given the "pass" to move on to those GUE courses.

I was greatly impressed by the skills exhibited by friends who had taken Fundies, but that in no way made them better people, or gave them the right to judge my or my other friend's choices.

 

[The Chairman]

Good advice. But amusing to come shortly after the comments of you, boulderjohn, and others about trying to correct lies and distortions.

I wasn't aware I was trying to correct any lies or distortions in this thread. I was sharing what I thought was a funny anecdote.

There will always be disagreements over the truth, strategies and tactics. There are some truly arrogant people out there and I'm probably guilty on many counts. But there's a line where calling someone arrogant stops being a description and starts being nothing more than an insult. There's another line where continued unwarranted criticisms towards another member becomes nothing short of cyber stalking. It's unfriendly and it can lead to having your account suspended or terminated.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

I have a reputation as being a PADI defender, but I am actually a defender of the truth. Every time someone repeats an old lie about PADI, I feel compelled to correct it. It keeps me very busy. I am tired of it. Just a day or so ago someone repeated the old lie that PADI instructors are not allowed to add to the course content, and I didn't even bother to respond to it. I'm just plain too tired of doing it.

Perhaps it's due to history, but sometimes people can get too sensitive about this. In the not too distant past I made a comment about being glad my agency allowed me to add material to the course content. I made no disparaging remarks or inferences about any other agency ... and yet I was publicly accused of promoting that old "lie".

I do make an effort, when commenting about what I see as weaknesses in dive instruction, to limit my comments to things I've personally experienced ... either during my 12 years teaching or as a result of my mentoring new divers and noticing the things they should know, but do not. It doesn't seem to keep some prominent folks on this board from accusing me of being one of those people who promotes "lies" ... and for a while it resulted in me just not contributing at all to this side of the forum.

My point being that sometimes people's perception of agency-bashing isn't that at all ... it's an honest attempt to contribute something to a conversation that gets perceived wrongly, based on the perceiver's history with past posters who aren't even on the board anymore ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)