[Quinn]

Great topic Jack.

I think any field has these fads - we're all looking for a one-shot, one-size-fits-all solution to the obstacles we face in our hobbies, work and life in general. In reefing it's the trends you've noted, in business it was e-commerce, in nutrition it's the Atkins diet. We're looking for this one paradigm shift that will change the way we do something. I think the problem we have, however, is that we have these theorists, many of them doctors like Atkins and Shimek, who come along with this idea, and develop a test, and find that their procedure works, and then release it, at which point it is bastardized to high hell and becomes another cliche for that social group.

The truth is (OK, I know this is a cliche as well) there are no simple solutions to complex questions. As noted, these great ideas that could lead to a partial reorientation of a discipline are often simply misconstrued by the greater masses, at which point they become useless. I don't know how well Shimek tested his DSB theory, but let's pretend his tests were stringent and objective and concluded that, by his methods, DSBs work. The average hobbyist with a DSB does not follow these instructions, and therefore they fail to work. Suddenly DSBs stop working, and e-commerce stops working, and we have DSB crashes, and the dot.com crash of 1999.

What needs to happen is everyone needs to be on the same level. This is fine for the sciences that attract a select few. When Einstein came up with the theory of relativity, it blew Newtonian physics out of the water and all the physicists who were worth their salt tossed out the old ideas and got with the new. In a hobby like reefing, few of us are educated enough to understand the theory behind DSBs and therefore we immediately fall away from what Shimek believes is a scientific level of reasoning, and therefore the paradigm becomes useless.

For true change to occur, everyone must remain in alignment through the chance. My criminology professor speaks in this way about crime control and the judicial system in Canada*. Someone gets a great idea, and we launch a space ship containing these new ideas towards the planet True Change. But everytime, the people behind the ship fail to follow the instructions and fail to include enough fuel, so the ship crashes back to Earth. Everytime someone in the hobby comes up with a new theory, it starts off nicely, but suddenly falls apart, crashes back down and we all trample it in the stampede to the next "big" thing.

In short, the hobbyist must change before the hobby itself can change.

* For those of you familiar with criminology, the paradigm shift he is speaking of is the "community policing" method.