Keeping up with Changing Thinking in Scuba

[boulderjohn]

It is instructive to look at 10-year old threads and see how the advice has shifted over time.

As well it should at times.

The problem with using ScubaBoard or other social media is illustrated by a statement from Woody Allen--"History is made by those who show up." If you have two different threads a week apart with the same topic, you can get different advice depending upon who showed up in what thread. You have to be experienced and judicious to understand what to take seriously and what to dismiss.

 

[rsingler]

+10 to a Wikipedia entry @kelemvor !
I would hope (ask?) that a PM circuit might begin amongst the most qualified potential authors, to begin that process.

 

[Couv]

a PM circuit might begin amongst the most qualified potential authors

As you're one of the aforementioned, what's the delay? You do know how to send a PM (aka conversation) don't you?

 

[sea_ledford]

I have a similar section in my AN/DP class on diving and technology. Instead of focusing on the latest and greatest gizmos and gadgets, I talk about resources to keep up with current thinking. I also found that google is not your fried if you don't know what to look for.

My recommendations are:
In-person conferences (most of which have videos, papers or proceedings that are available after the fact):
•Rebreather Forum 2 and 3
•TekDive conferences
•DEMA
•AAUS symposia

People to follow:
–Simon Mitchel
–Neal Pollock
–David Doolette
–Gareth Locke (innovative high performance teams training)

On-line resources:
–Youtube (if you are looking for something specific like "TekDive presentations")
–DAN workshop proceedings
–Rubicon Foundation
–Google Scholar

The deep stops thing has been a slow moving disaster for the past 13 years or so. It was pretty much found to be at best not helpful and at worst harming on non-deco dives as far back as 2007. There is a big hyperbaric medicine conference in Hawaii every year and the boat I was working on in Maui at the time would get several of the researchers out for the day every year. I would always ask what the new info was, and I was told about the deep stops issue in about 2007... it was a pretty succinct "Don't do them."

Just last week I was taking my NAUI standards update exam. What does the new 2018 standards promote? Deep stops.

-Chris

 

[AfterDark]

+1 on Rubicon Foundation.

 

[KevinNM]

I see this as a problem that many of us experience. We only know who someone is from SB or maybe somewhere else. Knowing who people are from SB is not as simple as it sounds. For instance, I go to great lengths to only expose who I am to a select few. Not that I'm hiding anything, but maybe....

I've met a very few people from here in real life and they have all been who they claimed. You figure out who knows what they are talking about if you hang around here a while. In general, guys who routinely do serious technical dives or are people who have their names on decompression research papers are who seem the most believable to me on the subject.

 

[boulderjohn]

There is a well established solution to this problem. You author an encyclopedia article on the subject. Your peers review it and flag parts of the article as needing change or make changes to it. After a little back and forth and a lot of vetting, you have a solid article about deep trimix diving procedures. When research changes the group think, someone updates the article and the process repeats. Each time the article must provide external references (ideally to published research as was referenced in the deep stop thread). It's a robust and elegant system.

Try it out today: Wikipedia It's the worlds largest encyclopedia by a country mile and the single greatest repository for human knowledge. It's also free. There are some who naysay encyclopedias and/or wikipedia. But there are naysayers for everything. Some people still believe in deep stops, others still believe the earth is flat (really, they're out there).

We have given this some thought.

Anyone can edit a Wikipedia entry. If you read the threads on this topic on ScubaBoard, you just might see a problem with that.

 

[The Chairman]

It would be easy enough to set up a forum where everyone can read, but only a select few can post. People would love to read such discussions even if they couldn't respond to them.

 

[rsingler]

It would be easy enough to set up a forum where everyone can read, but only a select few can post. People would love to read such discussions even if they couldn't respond to them.

Then here's one suggestion, if I may:
TWO restricted forums where the vortex of endless argument is avoided by keeping the parties in their own corners. I'd leave it to you to invite/select the contributors, and would suggest that the first post includes a link to the other thread, along with whatever else you think appropriate.

Forum A: A reasoned discussion on why and to what extent deep stops are an appropriate component of decompression
Forum B: A reasoned discussion on why and to what extent deep stops should be minimized or avoided during decompression

 

[CAPTAIN SINBAD]

A great question John.

Firstly, scubaboard has been an extremely instrumental tool in my own evolution as a diver. Even if people are not on scubaboard they have come across it one way or another. When we google search words such as deep stops, depth averaging, ratio deco etc, we will end up here through search engines whether you are a signed member or not.

The problem does not end when people end up on scubaboard. It compounds into a different type of a problem. It order to make sense of this place, you need to be long enough of a regular to know who is who and why some people hold the opinion that they do. Some of the most vocal voices on here are really not the most knowledgeable ones and I have met some really knowledgeable people in the real world who read these forums but choose to stay out of these debates. They do not respond or contribute here because they do not see any benefit is arguing or debating total strangers.

Similarly there are those who have trained from mainstream agencies such as PADI, SDI, NAUI etc and they tend to have a similar mindset. Then there are smaller agencies like GUE and UTD who are under-represented here because they are not turning out enough divers per year to have a similar on line presence. If we were to understand certain issues through scubaboard alone then the DIR community appears to be total nut jobs! I can guarantee you that if scubaboard was the only source of information then everyone would think that GUE/UTD are the craziest of the lot with UTD being the extreme on the spectrum. Yet when you meet these guys in person some of the things they propagate makes so much more sense in real world than what the mainstream is doing. Yet those arguments are not equally presented over internet.

Relating this back to the deep stops issue, I think you are totally correct that in the light of modern research deep stops, as they we understood in the past, have fallen out of favor and now the debate has evolved (thankfully) into how shallow should the shallow stop be? This is one issue which, when understood through scubaboard alone would lead you to believe that UTD is the most irrational of the lot. World renowned experts have spoken against deep stops and they are still stopping at a depth deeper than most algorithms! Yet one thing that has really not come up in these online deep stop discussions is this question ...

Exactly how much safer are you when you skip your deep stop and add that time to your shallow stop?

I wanted to avoid the mudslinging on these forums and ask one of the most knowledgeable people in the world, a known critic of deep stops and an occasional visitor to these forums Dr. Simon Mitchell. I asked him that while we are all appreciative of the fact that shallow stops are safer but exactly how safe are they? In other words, how dangerous are these UTD guys who are constantly bashed on scubaboard for their still "deeper than most" shallow stops? The answer that I got from Dr. Simon Mitchell was exactly what I have heard from UTD people who never visit these forums.

"if you did the same decompression time, but distributed your stop time shallower, then you would almost certainly have less risk, The actual difference in risk might be relatively small, and perhaps not worth arguing about." (Dr. Simon Mitchell to me during one of our personal chats.)

In other words, any safety margin that we are generating with our Shearwater computer over a memorized and simplified RD 2.0 is so small that our time may have been spent better if we had talked about other issues instead of this deep stop debate that has taken pages after pages on here. A lot of it has been generated by my own postings so I take full responsibility but things that seem so "freaking important" on scubaboard are really insignificant when we log off.

After realizing the insignificance of this deep stop debate, let us now try to market a Shearwater computer to the UTD folks. The marketing slogan would be something like this ...

"SHEARWATER PERDIX! THE 940.00 USD DIVE COMPUTER THAT MAKES YOU .0007 PERCENT SAFER!

USING TECHNOLOGY TO MAKE YOU SAFE ...

BECAUSE YOUR LIFE IS IMPORTANT!"

I can see why some people may not be buying a 1K dive computer. The marketing slogans do not sound the same to their ears that they sound to us. The lessons that I have learnt are as follows:

a) Diving is serious. Do not try to become part of the "internet herd."
b) A consensus on the internet does not mean that everyone in that consensus knows what they are talking about.
c) Agencies, shops or instructors with lowest or easiest training standards will graduate the highest number of students and they will always be the biggest and loudest voices on any internet forum. Internet herd will follow them.
d) People who are not part of the internet consensus are not crazy, delusional, ego driven psychopaths. They may not be online as much because they have gone diving!
e) It is always a good idea to go offline and meet people in the real world.

Cheers -

Sinbad