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Re: [bearbreeder] Rope knot to use when rappelling or anchoring:
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rgold
Jan 2, 2013, 4:45 PM
Views: 8383
Registered: Dec 3, 2002
Posts: 1804
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bearbreeder wrote: my point remains... ...miss a step when someone is posting something on a climbing safety related matter? ... youre dead, or your partner is
All true but irrelevant. People who have been shown in person miss steps all the time. People who read authoritative books miss steps all the time. Are you really suggesting that useful and correct information should be suppressed because someone might forget some of it?
bearbreeder wrote: theres no substitute for someone who knows what they are doing show you in person and being able to correct you if needed (and NO ONE i know off, including me, didnt need correction when they first started something new)
Agreed. Unfortunately, that magical wizard guardian may not be available when most needed.
bearbreeder wrote: i see it all the time where people set up anchors, tie knots, do multi, belay or rap incorrectly because they "learned it off the internet"
You interview everyone you see "doing things wrong" to discover where they learned it? Here's a prediction: just as many of those people "doing things wrong" learned them from books or the personal instruction of "experts" as learned anything from the internet.
bearbreeder wrote: a quick few minutes of real life instruction usually solves the issue
True enough, if the "issue" occurs when an "expert" is present and able to give corrective advice.
bearbreeder wrote: IF you must rely on the internet for safety advice ... do so at the websites of the climbing mags, UIAA, UKclimbing article, manufacturers sites, BMC or at the very least those of accredited guides, etc ..
Many of those sites give advice that is rather different from the advice promulgated in the U.S. by, say, certified guides. How many people belay the leader directly off the belay anchor, for example? How many people clip their belay device to the rope loop rather than the belay loop? At one point, the AMG manual recommended that now thoroughly-discredited figure-eight version of the EDK as an improvement on the ordinary EDK. And the BMC puts out a video illustrating tying and finishing a bowline at the same time as U.S. "expert" Duane Raleigh proclaims the bowline to be an "instrument of death."
I'm not saying those sites are unreliable, and by and large the variation in the quality of the advice is going to be considerably narrower from those places than the sampling from the internet, but there are things you can learn from the forums you won't get from manufacturers, guide services, and Euro websites.
bearbreeder wrote: ...not the intraweb forums where people are more concerned about "being right" or their own intraweb agendas as you can see in some of the current threads ...
So, the manufacturers don't have "agendas" and aren't "concerned being right?"
Look. The internet is a place where people get together to discuss things that interest them. Any such discussion is going to have a range of opinions and perspectives, and yes, some of these are going to be "wrong" by any reasonable standard. The reader/participant is going to have to be vigilant and take everything with a grain of salt. They may indeed get more reliable information from other expert sources, and should certainly seek such sources out. On the other hand, they may also get up-to-date perspectives on things that aren't available in books, they may learn about perfectly acceptable alternatives to things that are in the books, and they may learn about some cases when the books are wrong.
As an academic by profession, I and my colleagues spend a lot of our time being wrong about the things we're studying. Discussion and analysis are the tools that enable us to go from ignorance to expertise. I have a lot of faith in human intelligence, in spite of our many public illustrations of its failure, and I believe in the value of discourse to get at the truth. In climbing, bad information can be dangerous---all the more reason to develop a mentality based on discussion and evaluation rather than blind acceptance of "expert" opinion.
The entire history of human progress shows that attempts to suppress, marginalize, and trivialize free and open discussions are ultimately more destructive to knowledge than any of the errors in the discussions themselves.
(This post was edited by rgold on Jan 2, 2013, 5:11 PM)
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Post edited by rgold
() on Jan 2, 2013, 5:11 PM
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