by ErikCO » Fri Apr 24, 2020 3:33 pm
It is interesting how, no matter the area in life, there is "expert" opinion (and, while this does have application to our current social situation, it applies equally to skiing, science, medicine, and I'm sure many other areas in business and engineering) that becomes the accepted truth. Then anyone who disagrees with this truth, or even questions it, is ridiculed, ignored, and defunded. For a society that claims to value science highly, we certainly can take unscientific approaches to things! As part of the scientific method, we are supposed to be able to see an area where we think conventional wisdom is wrong, formulate a hypothesis, develop an experiment to test the hypothesis, and then execute the experiment.
In the case of PMTS, if the "experts" wanted to run a scientific study, they would take three good junior racing programs, have one use straight PSIA teaching, one use the weird mixup of PSIA with a few PMTS drills that I see an increasing number of people in the broader ski world using, and one using straight PMTS. Run them for 4-8 years and compare the outputs. That would be the scientific way for them to investigate. (Of course, they could just look at Harald's results of the years as well as Welch Village's results, skip the experiment, and reach the same result! But I use this in way of illustration.)