.this was written in the late nineties, and it had a "purpose" as an article. ...
Bill was attempting to give a thinking diver a new criteria to consider--
If you had to be litteral with Bill's article today, it would seem unreasonably restrictive of who you could dive with. ...
If Bill had been on a charter boat in 1998, and a diver with a stuffed hose and pressure guage dragging on the ground as he walked, wanted to buddy with him, Bill would have said NO...But with the configurations of 95% of the people on the tech lists of scuba board today, Bill would have said "fine, that would be great", and then he would have talked briefly about his expectations for the dive.
Today, if Bill Mee or I go out on a charter boat for a recreational dive, Bill and I would be buddies, and we will let practically anybody buddy with us, unless they look like a swimming accident ready to happen. ...
Dan's post reminds me of a concept I observed in my profession, which is educational theory. I wrote a paper on it years ago for a class when I was getting my administration certification. I called it the "Reduction Funnel."
You start with a big idea, one that has been carefully thought out. It seems to work pretty well. That big idea is taught to a group, but in reality not all of it can be truly presented, and less of even that reduced presentation is understood by the group. That group goes on to teach it themselves, presenting less than they learned to another group than learns only a percentage of what is presented. The process continues until at the bottom of the funnel the big idea is reduced to a few shouted slogans that may misstate the original big idea. At the top of the funnel, practitioners understand the complexities and can make mature judgments within the system. The farther you are down the funnel, though, the more you rely on those few shouted slogans, and the more dogmatically you demand that they be followed despite the circumstances.
The primary example I used was the writing instruction then being used in one of the largest school districts in the nation. In this instruction, all students in that school district were taught that they must
always follow certain practices in their writing, practices that made no sense to me and were rarely followed by professional writers. I followed it back to the original theory on which they were based, and I saw that these absolute rules contradicted the main idea of the original theory, a theory that included the idea of flexibility in approaches to writing. These "rules" were in fact simply derived from what was shown in the first example used in the full explanation--students were being taught that what the instructors saw in the first (of many) examples of ways to write was the only way it should be done.
An example from scuba instruction would be signs of panic. Scuba instruction manuals teach divers to look at a variety of signs that could indicate a panicked diver, including equipment rejection, but somehow that relatively complex idea has been reduced to the stern warning that placing a mask on the forehead is a sure sign of panic.
As I read Dan's comment, a person who truly understands the nature of diving in general and technical diving in particular can look at a situation and make a mature decision based on that judgment rather than an unthinking adherence to a poorly understood "rule."
