Attitudes Toward DIR Divers

[wetb4igetinthewater]

How do you know? Is it that PADI didn't do anything to hold the "suspect" dive shop accountable, or is it that PADI didn't meet your expectations of what they should have done?

There is that internal memo stating that they should maybe look more closely into that shop.

 

[Zach The Diver]

How do you know? Is it that PADI didn't do anything to hold the "suspect" dive shop accountable, or is it that PADI didn't meet your expectations of what they should have done?



Shouldn't your evidence of this be stronger than "(I believe?)" before publishing statements of this nature?

-Z

“I believe”, meaning I think that was the timeline of the previous incident. Dear god man.

 

[Zef]

“I believe”, meaning I think that was the timeline of the previous incident. Dear god man.

Again, I ask, how do you know they (PADI) didn't do anything? Are you privy to the communications between the shop/dive operation and PADI? Or are you just speculating that they (PADI) didn't do anything?

-Z

 

[Zach The Diver]

Again, I ask, how do you know they (PADI) didn't do anything? Are you privy to the communications between the shop/dive operation and PADI? Or are you just speculating that they (PADI) didn't do anything?

-Z

Take 30 seconds out of your day to scroll back to the link I posted in response to another diver earlier today. As I have stated earlier, I’m not engaging in this thread anymore. Good day.

 

[SlugLife]

First point you made-

That reads like we can’t have frank discussions about what might be better than something else without someone calling someone the “E Word” and taking a simple statement and transforming it into a 30+ page thread cascade like this one.

Second point-

Yes, you’re right. And maybe there is a more diplomatic way I could say certain things. My intuition tells me the reception would have likely been the same here.

I'm attempting to communicate something very nuanced.

• I'm not talking about bluntness, diplomacy, or words.
• I am talking about mindset, beliefs, and perspective.

Being a little over-simplistic (minor strawman, but I'm avoiding writing a novel), DIR and GUE promote the concept that they know and teach the right/correct/best/safest way to dive, and that diving any other way is inferior. Over time this becomes an implicit belief, which is then reflected in behavior and communication (like "dogmatism.")

Until that fundamental belief is addressed, the behavior and communication will follow, which naturally leads regular people to feel DIR/GUE behave like elitists. In other words, changing "DIR/GUE is the best/right/correct/etc way" to "DIR/GUE is a high quality and safe way to dive (but not the only one)"

---

Even if you convinced every person in this thread to stop calling DIR/GUE "elitists" it only takes on random diver to interact with an average DIR/GUE diver, for another to appear. Do we change the entire dive-community, lets say adding to Open Water courses "don't call DIR/GUE elitists," or is it perhaps something DIR/GUE should consider changing about their culture and belief system if they don't want to be viewed as elitists?

 

[Zach The Diver]

I'm attempting to communicate something very nuanced.

• I'm not talking about bluntness, diplomacy, or words.
• I am talking about mindset, beliefs, and perspective.

Being a little over-simplistic (minor strawman, but I'm avoiding writing a novel), DIR and GUE promote the concept that they know and teach the right/correct/best/safest way to dive, and that diving any other way is inferior. Over time this becomes an implicit belief, which is then reflected in behavior and communication (like "dogmatism.")

Until that fundamental belief is addressed, the behavior and communication will follow, which naturally leads regular people to feel DIR/GUE behave like elitists. In other words, changing "DIR/GUE is the best/right/correct/etc way" to "DIR/GUE is a high quality and safe way to dive (but not the only one)"

---

Even if you convinced every person in this thread to stop calling DIR/GUE "elitists" it only takes on random diver to interact with an average DIR/GUE diver, for another to appear. Do we change the entire dive-community, lets say adding to Open Water courses "don't call DIR/GUE elitists," or is it perhaps something DIR/GUE should consider changing about their culture and belief system if they don't want to be viewed as elitists?

I’m doing my best to disengage from this thread, but this post was one of the few good ones I’ve seen here that isn’t inflammatory bait or completely braindead, so I’ll bite.

I one hundred percent agree that you can’t expect the whole dive community to shift perceptions overnight because of some guy on the internet.

I also agree that these “elitists” exist, even though I never felt like I encountered any (I posted earlier about how my interactions with GUE/DIR have impacted my diving positively but I’m not writing a novel either).

A cultural shift to what you said- marketing GUE/DIR as high-quality, not the lone way to go about diving- is something I can probably get behind. The issue is that many people who go to GUE go there because they have drawn their own negative conclusions about the other agencies.

I also don’t think it’s fair for DIR divers to have to bear the burden or feel “embarrassed” about their background because someone else on the dive boat got their jimmies rustled by some big ego with a big H on their dive bag.

In my actual real life experience I have not met a single GUE or DIR diver that belittled me or put me down even when I was a fresh OW diver. Biggest a-hole I met in diving was actually my incompetent OW instructor.

This isn’t something that a thread will fix, that’s for sure. Like I said, posting this was a mistake.

Thanks for your actually insightful response.

 

[Lorenzoid]

DIR and GUE promote the concept that they know and teach the right/correct/best/safest way to dive, and that diving any other way is inferior.

The only instance I can recall seeing something like that was in the introductory chapter of the book Doing It Right: The Fundamentals of Better Diving. It didn't sit well with me when I first read it around 10 years ago and it still doesn't. In Fundies class, though, the only thing that might come close to what you describe is when I would ask the instructor why something is done the way it is rather than the way most of us were originally taught, and the instructor would reply with some explanation of why GUE believes their way is better or safer. I never got the impression that they believed other ways were simply wrong/incorrect or totally unsafe--just sub-optimal (I guess that is "inferior") and/or not as safe--and I took that as being GUE's opinion, which seemed fine to me. GUE is entitled to an opinion. My instructor would often say that GUE does things to "stack the odds in your favor," not that by doing it the GUE way your odds of being safe would be 100 percent or that by doing it some other way your odds would be much lower. My takeaway was that they just wanted to make us better, safer divers, not that all other divers are crap and unsafe. I don't know if the explicit denigration of the major agencies' instruction remains in the latest edition of the Fundamentals of Better Diving, but if it does I believe it reflects badly on GUE.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

I have ask a question, and anybody reading this can answer.

For someone that knows or knew nothing about DIR or GUE before reading this thread, what do you think their take-away is based on everything posted in this thread?
Speculators and also anybody new please respond.
Any attention is attention whether good or bad, that’s what they say anyway.
Who was inspired and who was turned off?
Just curious.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

I have ask a question, and anybody reading this can answer.

For someone that knows or knew nothing about DIR or GUE before reading this thread, what do you think their take-away is based on everything posted in this thread?
Speculators and also anybody new please respond.
Any attention is attention whether good or bad, that’s what they say anyway.
Who was inspired and who was turned off?
Just curious.

So I do know something about GUE, but I'll still respond based upon how I stayed away initially due to the instructors at the PADI shop I was at that called them the "military of diving" which didn't sound like any fun to me. I made the mistake of staying away as a result for years until curiosity got the best of me. Now I regret not taking fundies sooner (like right after open water).

I suspect that most people who haven't heard of GUE just want to enjoy themselves diving and will stay away as a result, despite some positives being expressed here. Who wants drama? (though when I was single, when a woman I was dating explicitly said she didn't want drama, she DID WANT drama LOL). The PADI sandwich is a more pleasant experience, and what they don't know, they don't know.

 

[Cthippo]

I have ask a question, and anybody reading this can answer.

For someone that knows or knew nothing about DIR or GUE before reading this thread, what do you think their take-away is based on everything posted in this thread?
Speculators and also anybody new please respond.
Any attention is attention whether good or bad, that’s what they say anyway.
Who was inspired and who was turned off?
Just curious.

Going back to the beginning the origibal question was "Why do people hold negative views of DIR divers?" A number of people responded with reasons, but many said that they also saw value in DIR equipment or techniques. Then the knives came out and the loud folx on both sides got nasty and behaved like middle aged men on the internet do.

So to answer your question, I think a reasonable and open minded person reading this thread would come away with an impression that DIR is a mindset focusing on consistency and excellence, geared towards cave diving, which gets a poor reputation amongst other divers from the attitude of some of it's adherents.