DIR- GUE Why are non-GUE divers so interested in what GUE does?

[boulderjohn]

As to the second point, the bell curve is the bell curve. You will always have students that will fail (or should have been failed), simple statistics will tell you that.

As soon as you start talking about the bell curve, you show you do not have a lot of understanding of educational theory. Unfortunately, that is true of many people in the field of education. It was taught for a long time, which is why so many people still think of it as a valid concept.

In theory (and only in theory), the bell curve reflects the abilities of the general population. That is what, again only in theory, you would see in the classroom when a class begins. It should never reflect the results of the class after those students have encountered a well-designed curriculum and the efforts of a skilled instructor to help those students who need more assistance to reach standards. If the actual results of a fair assessment at the end of a class end up in a bell-shaped curve, it is a sure indication of really bad instruction.

But most assessments that show a bell curve are not the results of fair assessment. In my early education classes, I was taught how to manipulate assessment design to create a bell-shaped curve of results. That is what happens with tests like the SAT--those tests are manipulated continually to make sure the results fit a bell curve, with 500 as the median score. It was not until much later in my career that I saw the research that showed that a fair assessment of student learning in a well-taught class will never, ever produce anything like a bell-shaped curve.

To start with, few, if any, class populations contain the full range of natural abilities. The higher the level of the class, the more the bottom range disappears. That was in part my point about screening--in a self-selecting scuba class, the people who do not have the ability to succeed are simply not there, or at least they would not be there if the student population were properly screened to keep out those who do not have the prerequisite skills needed for success. Thus, the bottom end of that theoretical bell curve, the ones who you expect might fail, is missing.

The most insidious part of bell-curve thinking is the feeling that it must be applied to a given population, no matter the content of that population of the actual results of assessment. This means student achievement is applied as a comparison of one student to another rather than to a standard of performance. Here are two true stories that will illustrate what I mean.

• My early bell curve teaching went away after a colleague expressed her frustration. She and another member of her department agreed to use the same final exam for a unit they were teaching. They also agreed to apply the bell curve for final grades. (She had a motive--she knew her colleague was absolutely incompetent, and she wanted those results to show that.) When it was done, the very worst score for any student she had taught was higher than the very best score for her colleague's students. But the colleague insisted that the bell curve be applied to each class separately rather than to the combined classes, which is what she had expected. As a result, his class scoring range was the same as hers, even though his best students had not done as well as his worst. She had to fail students who had done better than students who got A's in the other class.
• A student at Brown University, an elite Ivy-League school where all students are top of the line, went in to his chemistry teacher for mandatory grade counseling near the end of the semester. the purpose of the counseling was to allow students to know where they stood going into the final exam. The school had a policy that allowed freshmen to drop the class without penalty at that point. The teacher told him that he had an A average going into the final exam. She asked him about his life goals, and he said he wanted to be a doctor. She said she thought he would be a good one. He got an A on the final exam, and was shocked when his final grade was a B. The teacher explained that when the students who were failing the course dropped out, it shifted the curve, dropping him to the B range on the bell curve. In fact, she said, if one fewer student had dropped out, he would have stayed in the A range. He said something about his dream of being a doctor, and the teacher said, "Sorry, but you will never get into med school with a B in freshman chemistry."

 

[Lorenzoid]

GUE, to the best of my limited knowledge, actively discourages solo diving, and instructors will discuss very seriously with you, or even report you in some cases, if they see that you don't follow the methodologies and activelty endager yourself or other from a GUE perspective. To me this is resonable, and as basic quality control is a justified "sacrifice" for maintaining the GUE community as awesome as it is, since each GUE diver could be trusted on their skills and participate in fun or project dives with no questions asked. I cannot see why the life of other divers should be at risk in some hard exploration dives, because the X GUE member, instead of practicing team skills and maintaining their motor-skills, was solo diving the past N years.

Just to reiterate my thoughts on this that I posted above, I am dubious this sort of conflict arises in the real world. My belief is that there are virtually no divers who are active in the GUE community, let alone doing "hard exploration dives," yet secretly doing solo dives on the side.

It's one thing believing that GUE is too rigid, and another thing to consider it dogmatic.

Great point. We should use these words correctly.

Long before I started diving, I had a boss who once mentioned he thought I was "dogmatic" in how I approached my work. What he really meant was that my approaches were rigid; I did my best to apply the same approach even though the circumstances may have changed. But everything I did was supported by some reason in my mind. There are pros and cons to preferring rigidity, just as there are pros and cons to preferring flexibility.

 

[crofrog]

Finally, why shouldn’t I take Fundies again. Aside from the small issues of $€£1k, being taught NDL (is it still using gauge mode and a bottom timer?), and the equipment being backmount, etc. I’d need to dust off the backmount kit and spend some solo time brushing up on the Basic 5 in preparation— still don’t know any gooists! My core skills are as good as anyone and are well within standards.

Did you achieve a recreational pass?

 

[Adobo]

Yeap, I also went of topic given that you gave some honest and interesting points.

This discussion I am afraid it's well beyond my knowledge, since I don't see myself moving towards CCR anytime soon. You can call my following reasoning a falacy, but by default (before I investigate it myself etc) I would trust the choices of WKPP that performs dives that press the limits of possible, all these decades with an extremely good record.
Changes in GUE are slow, very slow for many, but I concider that a strength for the type of diving I prefer doing.
Again, I don't have any idea what to answer, just that many elite divers performing extreme dives seem to prefer this configuration than another one. Sure there are not the only elite divers in the world, and of course I will not argue against your take.

In overhead (please note, I am not cave trained), I bring 4 (2 backups, 1 primary, 1 backup primary in my pocket) and looks like an overkill already in practice.

In all dives I have made up to this point I always am at that same level as everybody else. Small exceptions are when in caverns, were this is not always feasible.
The thing is that always we have a maximum depth and a maximum duration in depth. ALL GUE divers ascent the exact same way safely since nobody violates the maximum depth and always you terminate the dive and ascent together when you reach the timeout.

You are describing a style of diving that is a lot less rigid and the diver can decide more freely on how to ascent. I prefer actually having a rigid plan and sticking with the plan. The only reason for me to follow my dive computer is if something went horribly wrong due to an emergency and I had to abandon my dive plan and left alone. This is a worst case scenario that I hope I will never experience, but I am paranoid enough to always dive with a second computer just in case.

I don't challenge the safety of your methods, since I am far less experienced than you are. It's reasonable to have different school of thoughts and for me team diving fits better with my mentality to this point. Simply that.


This seems to be poor briefing from the skipper's side to be honest. GUE does not train people for diving with currents (or at least I am not aware of the class), but I am confident that if you inform any GUE diver regarding the procedures (everyone deploys DSMB from X depth) they will follow them. If the GUE divers you have experienced are aware of the rules of the captain, and choose not to follow them, well, they are on the wrong and they do not represent the vast majority of the GUE community.


In this thread I never argued against divers that do not want to get involved to GUE. It's not for everyone, and I think from the first pages the thread the question of the OP has been answered. I take a bit of an issue with people assigning "dogma" to GUE, because not only it's extremely inaccurate, but also offensive to thousands of divers.

Agreed. Even if you had much less experience/skills/etc... the metnality you are displaying is not fitting for GUE. And I would like to emphasize that I don't mean that in a degrading way, it's just that GUE is training divers who are already having some basic agreement with their main core philosophy. If you decided to start training with GUE without finding a value on the style of diving, it will be a waste of time of everyone in involved, especially yourself. It's like forcing a classic music player participating in jazz courses. If they are not interested on learning how to play jazz, or incorporating jazz to their music, it's a waste of resources.

@mariosx One thing to keep in mind is that many people who come to the DiR forum have zero interest is in learning about it. They come here to do anything but learn. They come here to grind their axes. They come her to spread misinformation. They come here to create confusion and doubt.

In all honesty, I have no idea why. There are like 25 other sub forums in scubaboard where they can talk all the bullshevik about GUE / DiR that they want. Or push their pony bottle, deep air, solo diving approach to diving. Yet they insist on coming here. No idea why.

Here are a few things to note:
- ”Helium is expensive” is not a new thing. Helium has been expensive for as long as I have had my tech 1 card. Granted, its not that long but its longer than some of the people who posing as experts have been diving.
- Rebreathers might be a fact of life today but they have been a fact of life as long as I have been diving. I have been hearing about Recreational CCR for as long as I have been diving.
- You don’t need 15 different computers to track how much deco you need to do. You can get all the way through tech2 with a uwatec bottom timer.
- I am not familiar with either the JJ or the RB80. I know my friends who dive the JJ have multiple computers. I have never explored the reason why since I honestly don’t care. And since I am an ocean diver primarily, I don’t interact with RB80 divers. Regardless, how these units are configured has a lot to do with the philosophy of keeping things familiar to the diver. When you are in OC doubles, your valves are to the top behind your back. Having seen the JJ, it seems to me that if there were reasons to try and diagnose bubbles coming out of your valves or manifold, the procedure seems to be very similarly whether on OC vs. CCR. My guess is that it is the same for the RB80.

My point to all that isn’t really to impart knowledge about tech diving or rebreather diving. Many others here are better suited for that. It is more to tell you that many are spouting off in this thread as if their way is the right way and the DiR way is wrong. Whether or not this or that is right or wrong, that is a discussion for another thread. What I will say is that if you want to learn about DiR, look for these names as they have been around for a long time or at the very least, they do the dives: Rtodd, Lamont, Liteheaded, pfcaj, Rjack (Richard may not be fully DiR anymore but at least he can speak to the topic deeply and objectively). There are a host of new other people but I don’t know them yet as I was on diving hiatus for a few years and am just revving up again.

 

[Adobo]

@Wibble You are arguing with someone that is at the Fundies level. I don't see what he is saying because he is on ignore for me, but he isn't going to be able to make a convincing case to you simply because he doesn't have the breadth of experience required to answer your questions.

Just by reading the way he formats his replies, I would say that he is not interested in being convinced/educated of anything as it pertains to DiR. He is here to argue that DiR is wrong.

 

[crofrog]

@boulderjohn i'd be curious your take on this article. It's from a different domain but I think a lot of it is broadly applicable

 

[Adobo]

Just to reiterate my thoughts on this that I posted above, I am dubious this sort of conflict arises in the real world. My belief is that there are virtually no divers who are active in the GUE community, let alone doing "hard exploration dives," yet secretly doing solo dives on the side.

Well.. I don’t do them but you know, there are solo dives and then there are solo dives. You know what I mean?

 

[PfcAJ]

“I failed fundies and have come to the conclusion that DIR is nonsense”

 

[jadairiii]

That was in part my point about screening--in a self-selecting scuba class, the people who do not have the ability to succeed are simply not there, or at least they would not be there if the student population were properly screened to keep out those who do not have the prerequisite skills needed for success. Thus, the bottom end of that theoretical bell curve, the ones who you expect might fail, is missing.

We dont live in a "theoretical world". But you are still "failing" people by telling them at the door to go home, and my "bell curve" still exists, its just that you fail them before they start, not at the end of class.

In essences, by keeping those you believe to be "failures" out, you would be manipulating the outcome to fit your preconceived bias.

And I admit I do not share you abilities and knowledge of education theory, but I have taken enough calculus and statistics classes to know that, at the end of the day, the math doesn't "lie" there will always be data points at either end of the curve. As you stated in your first sentence, "educational theory", not educational fact.....

 

[Manatee Diver]

Just by reading the way he formats his replies, I would say that he is not interested in being convinced/educated of anything as it pertains to DiR. He is here to argue that DiR is wrong.

Maybe, maybe not. I honestly don't really care about the back and forth, because, so I only scanned through those posts. Just pointing out that we have someone that would be classified by most as an experienced tech diver arguing with someone with a very minimal amount of experience. It has been a while since I read his posts, but he is at best a tech pass. It would be like me making an argument about how the GUE JJ config sucks with Kirill. I am completely outclassed in experience and on arguing a subject that I know little about.