SH294: Clickbait, trolls and comments. How dive incident posts can teach us — if we let them
About this episode
The episode discusses how social media discussions about diving incidents often lead to blame rather than learning, advocating for a shift in perspective to improve understanding.
Discussions about diving incidents on social media often follow a predictable pattern: a short, simplified post describes what happened, and comments quickly focus on blaming the individual involved, creating a sense of clear-cut failure and easy lessons. This happens not because people have bad intentions, but because simple, linear stories and knowing the outcome push our brains toward hindsight judgement, making complex situations seem obvious after the fact. As a result, important factors like conditions, pressures, communication, and decision-making context are ignored, limiting real learning. Over time, this blame-focused culture encourages people to share less detail or avoid posting altogether, which removes the very information needed to understand incidents properly. To improve learning, the community needs to shift from asking “what went wrong” to “why it made sense at the time,” and respond to posts with curiosity rather than judgement, creating an environment where fuller, more useful stories can be shared and understood. Original blog: https://www.thehumandiver.com/post/clickbait-trolls-and-comments Tags: THD-English | THD-Learning, Incidents & Just Culture
People in this episode
Host: Gareth Lock
Topics covered
- diving incidents
- social media
- hindsight judgement
- learning from failure
- community engagement
- decision-making
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: The Human Diver
More episodes of Counter-Errorism in Diving: Applying Human Factors to Diving
- SH297: CRM, ISO 8804, and Scientific Diving: Opportunities and Existing Materials
- SH296: When 'I'm Fine' Isn't True: Speaking Up and Ending the Dive
- SH295: Four Ways We Talk About 'Human Factors' in Diving
- SH293: Why does nothing change? Why do the same failures keep happening?
- SH292: Learning or Blaming: The Choice the Diving Industry Needs to Make. Part 3 of 3.
- SH291: What the Data Told Us: Fear, Trust, and the Stories That Never Get Told. Part 2 of 3.
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