

Psychological Factors in the Failed World Depth Record Attempt 2015 - agarttha
http://scubatechphilippines.com/scuba_blog/guy-garman-world-depth-record-fatal-dive/

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duffdevice
Interesting read, thanks for posting this. I was flabbergasted to see that he
had only been diving for 4 years when he made the attempt.

Two points in this article really rang true to me in particular:

\- the tendency for divers to speed through increasingly more advanced dive
certifications. Often I'll be at the dive shop waiting on a tank fill, and
I'll overhear somebody talking about how they had such a fun time during their
beginner open water certification that they signed right up for advanced and
divemaster courses. There's nothing wrong with educating oneself, but I think
the false sense of mastery instilled by these courses is clearly a potential
danger. The material learned in the class must be complemented by real-world
experience for the concepts to become second-nature. The dive shops make money
on this mindset too and so share lots of the guilt.

\- going deep for the sake of going deep. There's always that one guy (it's
always a guy in my experience) whose goal is to get deeper than everybody else
on the boat. As far as I can tell, it's pure machismo. Not only does it lead
to accidents like this, but you have less bottom time, worse visibility due to
lower light, and in most places the richest animal life is not at the deepest
part of the dive. So it's stupid. This article seems like that mindset taken
to the extreme.

I don't want to speak callously of the dead, but this guy appears to have had
it coming. And I think the dive shop that sponsored him should bear a big
chunk of the responsibility for this accident, as outlined in the article.

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ssaddi
Very nicely written article. You could apply the principles discussed here to
any other dangerous sports, like boxing, racing etc. It is sad that our
society rewards egoistic thoughts. People are happy to applaud someone
boasting how deep they have gone underwater, yet no one wants to tell them
that greater depths poses greater risk on the physiology of the body and
psychology of the mind.

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twcooper
Am I the only one distracted by the blogger's blatant misuse of the semicolon?

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dr_zoidberg
Not just the semicolons, the excessive use of ellipses............ and many
other details of his style left me just skimming over the topics and not
reading the whole thing, which felt like it could've been shorter!

