Instructors - Agencies Split from overweight

[Thalassamania]

so we are talking 20,000 divers trained vs millions of divers trained and 500,000 dives vs 100,000,000 or more dives? That kind of skews any relevance.

If you were not in such a rush to make your case you might have taken to time to read "four and a half million dives" rather than "a half million dives.":shakehead

 

[Sideband]

Sorry. I did miss that. Even so, the numbers are so freaking far apart that there really isn't a correlation. I'd be willing to bet that my 100,000,000 is probably several 100,000,000 low. That really makes 4 million meaningless in comparison.

 

[Thalassamania]

With all due respect, this is not a statistical argument. The question is, "is 20,000 trained divers and 4.5 million dives sufficient experience to expose flaws in the program?" I submit that it is. This is hardly your facetious example for a 10 minute class with zero participants.

If you want to make it statistical a question you need to come up with a number of divers and a number of dives, a messy question at best. And then you need a number of fatalities and a number of ear injuries, neither of which are available. The DAN figures while interesting, are BS since they are based solely on passive reporting.

The statistical question becomes, "is zero occurrences in a population of 20,000 with 4.5 million trials different than say (approximately) 3000 occurrences in a population of say 10 million who have learned to dive since the beginning, who have made about 75 million dives?" And the exact answer to that question is, in reality, meaningless since the assumption of a random distribution of fatalities is bogus from the get go.

I guess what the question comes down to is, "would you rather have you loved ones trained using a methodology with a zero fatality rate and a very small minor injury rate or using a methodology that has a fatality rate in the range of one in five thousand and a minor injury rate that is several orders of magnitude greater than that, but that is a half to a third the price?"

Might I point out, in case you really want to purse the invalid statistical comparison that for a population of 20,000 divers we'd expect at least 4 fatalities.

 

[Mako Mark]

...I bet if she had better training, the chances of her panicking would have been much lower.
There. I said it.

nope

level of training and propensity to panic have nothing to do with each other.

Propensity to panic is directly related to comfort in the water and ability to solve problems under stress (such as I need air now)

 

[Thalassamania]

nope

level of training and propensity to panic have nothing to do with each other.

Propensity to panic is directly related to comfort in the water and ability to solve problems under stress (such as I need air now)

Are you saying that the level of training is unrelated to comfort in the water and to the ability to solve problems under stress?

 

[tracydr]

How much?

I think anybody is subject to panic at anytime. Just load up too much stress (work, home, financial, and add the stress of things going wrong and all bets are off. Panic is a hormonal/neurotransmitter reaction. Anybody can have a panic attack. You could be sitting at a stoplight and suddenly have a panic attack for no reason.
We know nothing about this woman. Perhaps she has Post Traumatic Stress syndrome from an abusive relationship or other significant trauma. Perhaps she had lost a child in the past and was worried about diving with her children, to the point of overloading her neurosensory system.
Unless we know her entire history there is no way to figure out the cause of the panic. She could be an experienced tech diver but something was just off that morning or she had a flashback to another situation.
PTSD is strange, as are panic attacks. They don't really make any sense. A person has an overwhelming sense of doom and endangerment, far exceeding actual situation. Although training helps to prevent panic, it will never eliminate all panic from all people.

 

[Thalassamania]

I know nothing of the specific situation surrounding the accident that began this discussion, it is a tragedy for all concerned, especially as it touches the children in the family directly. Perhaps in time, as the facts come out, we will be able to address the specifics more directly.

In general, however, Doc T, we both agree and part company. To my way of thinking a panic attack is a pathological condition, often associated with depression and agoraphobia (and other social phobias). While I grant that it is a tautology, it is a "mental illness" and is not evidenced in mentally healthy people. That said, there is the question of who among us is truly mentally healthy?

Functional panic (stemming from some real danger and fear) is not the same as a Panic Attack (resulting from an internal cause). Though much of the symptomology is the same, the etiology is different. People can learn to control both functional panic and panic attacks. Granted there are situations extreme enough to put anyone into a functional panic state.

 

[Walter]

Propensity to panic is directly related to comfort in the water and ability to solve problems under stress (such as I need air now)

True. Both of these can be taught to most people.

 

[bfw]

So, the evidence is anecdotal at best.

Not really - the largest agency has continually articulated goals, philosophies and progam changes that reinforce Mike's characterization.

Also, I don't teach students under 14. That's the lower cap accepted by the Boy Scouts and I am OK with that.

See? Right there you're in conflict with the business model of the dominant agency, which practically screams at its members that they need to be teaching 10 year olds for the industry to survive. You criticize Mike for calling the mainstream irresponsible, then cite your deviation from the mainstream as evidence that you are responsible. Then you cite an organization outside of diving that the current cultural mainstream condemns as archaic hate-mongering bigots as your authority for your definition of responsible behavior. While you may be doing the right thing, you're clearly out of touch to think that your sound and responsible practices represent mainstream thinking or business models. You've pointed out in another thread that you make your money elsewhere, so clearly, your personal experience isn't very representative of the huge and growing number of instructors who teach diving for a living. I think you'd find that you'd have to compromise your personal standards a great deal to make in dive instruction what you make in your current day job.