Keeping up with Changing Thinking in Scuba

[EireDiver606]

BTW, about a month ago, I participated briefly in a FaceBook exchange in which the people were attacking PADI and other mainstream recreational agencies because so many years after deep stops had shown to be so important they were still not making it a mandatory part of their instruction for recreational diving. My participation was brief because I rained on that parade, pointing out that research did not support that, so I was removed from the discussion.

I have joined a diving club in my local area and my instructor supports deep stops.... he was explaining how safety/ deco stops get rid of fast tissue nitrogen and deep stops get rid of slow tissue nitrogen which is deeply absorbed in bones.

I knew that this has conflicting arguments on internet with new research.

Should I tell him he’s wrong, which will make me look bad seen as I’m new and it will make me look like a know it all.

Or should I not tell him what I’ve found here? He’s a good guy but probably wouldn’t believe stuff on the internet from you guys. I’m not sure what to do.

 

[EireDiver606]

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).

Wikipedia is not a reliable source ass people can change the information. School and college will not accept your work if you have sourced info from Wikipedia. I have personal experience finding something completely wrong on Wikipedia - Completely.

 

[KevinNM]

Wikipedia is not a reliable source ass people can change the information. School and college will not accept your work if you have sourced info from Wikipedia. I have personal experience finding something completely wrong on Wikipedia - Completely.

I've seen a fairly major and controversial claim buttressed solely with a link to a journal published in (iirc) Serbian that the reference librarians couldn't find. So yeah, well established and non-controversial subjects are often pretty good, but once you get into politics or controversial subjects it's a crapshoot.

 

[boulderjohn]

Sometimes it is best not to and just do what works for you.

For example, there was a time when the collective scuba knowledge held that diving nitrox was extremely dangerous. If you were to research current scuba thinking in the early 1990s you would think that nitrox was bad. You would have gotten bad information.

But if you kept up with the current knowledge for only a few years, you would have been aware of the change in thinking.

 

[boulderjohn]

Wikipedia is not a reliable source ass people can change the information. School and college will not accept your work if you have sourced info from Wikipedia. I have personal experience finding something completely wrong on Wikipedia - Completely.

As someone who used to teach research, I would not accept ANY encyclopedia for research. That is the sort of place you look for information in middle school projects. They are also good for quick lookups for information. They are not tools for any serious research.

 

[chillyinCanada]

I have joined a diving club in my local area and my instructor supports deep stops.... he was explaining how safety/ deco stops get rid of fast tissue nitrogen and deep stops get rid of slow tissue nitrogen which is deeply absorbed in bones.

I knew that this has conflicting arguments on internet with new research.

Should I tell him he’s wrong, which will make me look bad seen as I’m new and it will make me look like a know it all.

Or should I not tell him what I’ve found here? He’s a good guy but probably wouldn’t believe stuff on the internet from you guys. I’m not sure what to do.

Have you considered running off the paper/study and handing it to him saying " I ran across this the other day. I think you will be very interested in this new information."

 

[gypsyjim]

I think that, if rebreathers were safer and "idiot proof", then a lot of people would switch to them (cost of the unit notwithstanding). Until that day however basic scuba gear remains an affordable relatively easy way to get underwater.

. "A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."
Douglas Adams

 

[gypsyjim]

An interesting question posed in post 1.

How DO we know when using the internet to "research" any subject, which article, paper or link is to the latest, or most accurate information on any subject, and which ones have been made obsolete by later work?

Google Search pulls up the sites with the most popularity, the most traffic, on any subject, NOT necessarily the most accurate.

An older, even now badly outdated paper on a subject could have far more traffic, historically, than a new updated report by the very same author, researcher or agency, that has corrected earlier mistakes, so that older paper will appear at the top of the list of hits on Google, pushing the updates to page 6 of the Search where fewer bother reading.

 

[chillyinCanada]

I don't stop at one article/reference. I'll even move in a page or two. We need to be discerning. How are people not onto that yet, when it comes to the internet?

 

[Neilwood]

I don't stop at one article/reference. I'll even move in a page or two. We need to be discerning. How are people not onto that yet, when it comes to the internet?

Because it is easier and quicker to stop at the first page.

If you see a number of articles all suggesting the same thing (as was the case with the OP's choice of subject), then it is all too easy to assume that those are correct and current.

The better way is to look at trusted sources such as UHMS or DAN (making sure to bring up their page and not just the search result for that subject - often there will be further info).