What happened here?

[ScubaSteve]

I visit here to learn from mistakes and read the valuable failure analysis of accidents and I am flooded with page after page of condolenses to families and have a hard time getting anything out the threads because of the searching and searching through the pity threads. What happened to the rules of the threads here? I quote from the "sticky":

(4) No "condolences to the family" here

It is important for us as a community to assess and discuss diving accidents and incidents as a means of preventing them. However, once emotions are involved intelligent discussion becomes next to impossible. If the moderators feel that the discussion is getting out of hand in any thread they may close or remove the thread, with or without notice.

next to impossible? Yup v

Not trying to be unfeeling but....look at the thread titles and tell me if the "rules" are enforced so we may get down to the business of saving lives!

Thank you for posting this Bob. I have personally been caught in a fight which should never have started because people wanted to use this forum as the nicey nice forum for condolences and felt I was an ass when I politely asked someone to qualify their comments. Their comments basically said that I needed to take my issues elsewhere because this was no place for it. Well, I sent them a polite PM explainging things and had a post reply written doing what you did.....restating the TOS which we all should have read and understood) but I deleted it instead because I knew it would only fuel the fire which would not have been productive.

Doing it this way, is a great way of forcing people to read the note without offending anybody because of their thread topic.

I, not unlike many that have posted, have slipped and done something like this that were non-compliant (slightly or blatently should not really matter) with the TOS. However, these were slips and I will support 100% an effort to get back to obeying them.

 

[oldtimerbob]

Thank you to one and all. Maybe the readers of this post will start a wave of change that will ultimately get this small portion of the forum back on course. Lets all get back to our educations and remain safe from the experience.

 

[Puffer Fish]

Thank you to one and all. Maybe the readers of this post will start a wave of change that will ultimately get this small portion of the forum back on course. Lets all get back to our educations and remain safe from the experience.

Given the number of people on SB... and that some people feel actually sad about some events....if there were not some posts like that, I would be shocked.

Empathy in humans varies tremendously...just pole a group of women versus men on this issue and see just how different that can be.

Having been an accident investigator for real, I think it is human nature (for most people) to show some respect for those involved before moving on to the details.

Obviously, just posting condolences does not help, but does it actually do any harm? I don't think they should be there, but they neither help nor hurt the discussion

Jumping to conclusions, arguing over points of view... placing blame... those things actually do prevent getting to the real cause.

Placing the same importance to every issue (like talking about violations of the law, where speeding and mass murder would be viewed as equal) does not bring more people into the discussion, it reduces it.

 

[pescador775]

My posts on Scubaboard are mostly technical. I rarely view this Accident room, much less post herein. The reason is that I am uncomfortable in the company of professional mourners and voyeurs. Moreover, since my diving style rarely involves anything which is considered "safe" there is not much to share.

 

[ba_hiker]

Given the number of people on SB... and that some people feel actually sad about some events....if there were not some posts like that, I would be shocked.

Empathy in humans varies tremendously...just pole a group of women versus men on this issue and see just how different that can be.

Having been an accident investigator for real, I think it is human nature (for most people) to show some respect for those involved before moving on to the details.

Obviously, just posting condolences does not help, but does it actually do any harm? I don't think they should be there, but they neither help nor hurt the discussion

Jumping to conclusions, arguing over points of view... placing blame... those things actually do prevent getting to the real cause.

OF COURSE we all have empathy for the survivors, and feel sorry for their losses. There are very few total louts here.

Suppose all the 100,000 (or any substantial subset) or so scuba boarders posted their condolences for every death how could we ever find analysis of events mixed in the mess? And perhaps one person reading the analysis of events could have learned something that kept them from being the one being posted about. And our 100,000 condolences posts kept them from finding and learning the bit that would have saved them...

I have learned several things here that may keep me out of trouble a bit and i want to keep finding them.

lets keep the sympathy posts in one place and the analysis in another. Moderator please don't feel like a heel for moving posts to the right forum. Feel like maybe you are allowing someone to find the bits of info that may save their life.

 

[Bottomfeeder Brodie]

OF COURSE we all have empathy for the survivors, and feel sorry for their losses. There are very few total louts here.

Suppose all the 100,000 (or any substantial subset) or so scuba boarders posted their condolences for every death how could we ever find analysis of events mixed in the mess? And perhaps one person reading the analysis of events could have learned something that kept them from being the one being posted about. And our 100,000 condolences posts kept them from finding and learning the bit that would have saved them...

I have learned several things here that may keep me out of trouble a bit and i want to keep finding them.

lets keep the sympathy posts in one place and the analysis in another. Moderator please feel like a heel for moving posts to the right forum. Feel like maybe you are allowing some on to find the bits of info that may save their life.

Amen Brother! ^5

 

[Bottomfeeder Brodie]

Good reading would be the DAN annual reports which should be discussed on this forum.

 

[b1gcountry]

I get into this as well. It is hard to really pick someone apart when they have just done something stupid and died from it. I don't think it's very good taste to criticize something someone did in these cases where the loss is still fresh in someone's mind. It just doesn't seem right, and I would feel like a jerk if the family were to read my comments...

Another thing that bugs me about the discussions about divers who have passed very recently is that we just don't have a clue what happened. If someone posts a link to an internet writeup of some diving tragedy, the newspeople don't publish enough information for divers to really analyze the events leading to a fatality, and all anyone can really offer is just "It is a great Loss" etc.

Most of the time these events are discussed, it is based on a lot of heresay, and people here make up the facts that were not clear in the initial report. Some of my least favorite threads here have been the ones with just enough information to make people jump to all kinds of conclusions without any actual knowledge that it actually happened that way.

Perhaps its best to keep things out of the accidents and incidents forum until we A. Know enough to make an accurate analysis, and B. Let the incident pass long enough so the family gets the chance to mourn...

$.02
Tom

 

[mkutyna]

I think there's value in speculating as to the cause of an accident. We can still discuss it as a potential cause and how it could have been avoided even though it may not be the actual cause. Even though some of us in this forum are accident investigators, none of us are actually doing a real accident investigation using this forum.

 

[Garrobo]

What Bob said.