Hacker News Reader

Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

Folks in this thread are real quick to dismiss any concern for the animal and it’s habitat and that’s pretty sad. Is it so hard to believe human activity is harming these animals?

View on HN

It's not an inability to believe it's true. It's more being burnt out by ritualized concern. It comes from seeing something awful that we're all supposed to be concerned about, listening to people beat their chest about it, and then the next day it's something else and those people have moved on to that and forgotten about yesterday's crisis.

If some people are responding to this study inappropriately that’s their problem. But when presented with this information I find it unhelpful for people to dismiss it and say things are fine. Things are not fine for the animals of this planet and I don’t think that should be dismissed, even if some types of people’s response to the information is annoying.

That's overtly cynical. The truth is, in many cases, we won't know what we should possibly be concerned about, unless we are offered the right information.

We all have our blind-spots, and we all have our partialities.

If 'ritualized concern' actually means, to you, that people aren't as concerned about your beliefs, as you think they should be, then that's quite different to a discussion about whether the whale in the visualisation, really feels the way I suspect it might.

It's very easy to believe and it has absolutely nothing to do with the speed and motion of ships and instead with the presence of sonar and engine and propeller noises.

What struck me about the data was how congested the area seems. We know about noise problems but I found the data very helpful in visualizing the size of the whales habitat compared to the quantity of boat traffic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com