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Sorry, but I intend to raise a bit of guilty conscience. I know it's unpopular and useless, but I feel I have to, once in a while... A week before this submari

Sorry, but I intend to raise a bit of guilty conscience. I know it's unpopular and useless, but I feel I have to, once in a while... A week before this submarine exploded, a boat capsized near Greece. Between 400 and 500 persons died. In both cases, it's a tragedy, but I have much more empathy for those who fled (mostly from Pakistan and Afghanistan), struggled for weeks or months on a very dangerous path, and hoped for a better life in Europe. Their deaths were probably much more painful than the crash that suddenly ended the lives of the Titanic tourists. There is still a mist of mystery around the refugees deaths: the Greek coastal guards had been cruising near the boat, and they have changed many times their story of it. They finally admitted that they tried to tow her, but deny other claims from reporters, NGOs and even the European coast guards. There's a suspicion of unintended mass-murder, or at least (racist?) negligence. Shouldn't that draw as much focus as the failures of a submarine company? I know that news coverage is unfair. I believe that most people don't even realize that they're biased on this — we all are in different ways. It's the same with Russia: I think most people are sincere when they say that this war is unprecedented, that our human values are at stake in this war, and that UN and international justice should act against Poutine. Ever heard of the mote and the beam? In a near past, USA invaded Iraq. And today, our country leaders lick the boots of MBS, the dictator of Saudi Arabia that started a war in Yemen which killed 380,000 persons, and who ordered thousands of bombings on mostly civilians targets. The irony is that MBS' order of chainsawing an opponent brought him trouble, while this bloody war and the regular decapitation of dozens of opponents went almost unnoticed.

criddell 3y ago
> When the number of victims in a tragedy increases, our empathy decreases. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/11/27/18103071/psychic-numbing-mass-suffering-psychology https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/11/27/18103071/psych...
- xoxxala 3y ago
  "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic." - Kurt Tucholsky (usually misattributed to Joseph Stalin)
4ggr0 3y ago
That really pissed me off about this whole story. Hundreds of people drown on the surface of the sea. A bit of news coverage, "oh no", that's it. But if 2 billionaires get lost 4km under the sea level it's not a problem to start a multi-day search which I don't even want to know the cost of. As usual people in general don't really care about refugees, a lost submarine just tickles our monkey-brains, I guess.
- pvaldes 3y ago
  This is just demagogy. Huge efforts have been put to rescue other people also. Spanish institute of oceanography worked for months to find and recover the corpse of (a non billionaire) little girl kidnapped by her father. Her body was recovered from a bag sank 1000m deep after months of effort. All just to give his family a sort of closure, and not, nobody wanted to know the cost of the submarine robot. > As usual people in general don't really care about refugees The resources spent by several countries to rescue immigrants is much, much more higher, by ten nautical miles and sustained since decades so please, stop with the moral BS. If your point is to stress that billionaire's relatives have more resources and money to hire rescuers, well... yep. Color me surprised.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  There's a formal field of study related to the newsworthiness of rare events like accidents. Essentially, you sum up the "value" of people that died all at once, and certain thresholds elevate that to "local news", "national news", or "international news". Sure, it might seem horribly cold to think of people as having value, but they do. A simple metric is to take their annual income, and pretend it is an interest payment on some cash in a bank account. Typical westerners are hence worth a few million dollars. Lebanese refugees? A few tens of thousands each, if that. The billionaires in the sub added up to more than the refugees on the boat. That's it. It's that simple. If Trump, Bezos, Gates, or Musk die, it's guaranteed to be global news, one hundred percent. If ten ordinary people die? Eh... nobody cares. To put things in perspective, in the same period of time that the sub was being searched for, about a week, globally we lost: About 25,000 people to car crashes. About 30,000 to preventable diseases. About 50,000 to industrial accidents and work-related diseases. And a mere 5,000 or so to the war in Ukraine. That boat near Greece? It barely rates. It's a statistic.
tlb 3y ago
HN isn't intended for discussing things proportional to their moral value. It's for discussing things that are intellectually interesting. This story is interesting to many HN readers because of the technology involved (carbon fiber subs) and the entrepreneurial risk taking / hubris. There might be a good discussion to be had here about refugee ships, but you'd need to find an angle of intellectual interest.
- mhh__ 3y ago
  Sad to see the world solely in these terms.
- contravert 3y ago
  There is clear intellectual interest in comparing and contrasting why certain events receive outsized attention compared to objective outcomes (e.g. number of casualties).
- flangola7 3y ago
  What? Their comment was highly intellectually interesting. What are you even talking about?
dehrmann 3y ago
The sub story caught traction for the same reason Balloon Boy did in 2009: there's an element of the unknown and a rescue angle. Same as the kids in the Tham Luang cave. Sadly, refugee boats capsize all the time in the Mediterranean, and there's no ongoing drama.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  Also, submarines are generally newsworthy even when they aren't going missing. The numerous media appearances the CEO did before the accident are evidence of this.

criddell 3y ago

> When the number of victims in a tragedy increases, our empathy decreases. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/11/27/18103071/psychic-numbing-mass-suffering-psychology https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/11/27/18103071/psych...

xoxxala 3y ago
"The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic." - Kurt Tucholsky (usually misattributed to Joseph Stalin)

4ggr0 3y ago

That really pissed me off about this whole story. Hundreds of people drown on the surface of the sea. A bit of news coverage, "oh no", that's it. But if 2 billionaires get lost 4km under the sea level it's not a problem to start a multi-day search which I don't even want to know the cost of. As usual people in general don't really care about refugees, a lost submarine just tickles our monkey-brains, I guess.

pvaldes 3y ago
This is just demagogy. Huge efforts have been put to rescue other people also. Spanish institute of oceanography worked for months to find and recover the corpse of (a non billionaire) little girl kidnapped by her father. Her body was recovered from a bag sank 1000m deep after months of effort. All just to give his family a sort of closure, and not, nobody wanted to know the cost of the submarine robot. > As usual people in general don't really care about refugees The resources spent by several countries to rescue immigrants is much, much more higher, by ten nautical miles and sustained since decades so please, stop with the moral BS. If your point is to stress that billionaire's relatives have more resources and money to hire rescuers, well... yep. Color me surprised.
jiggawatts 3y ago
There's a formal field of study related to the newsworthiness of rare events like accidents. Essentially, you sum up the "value" of people that died all at once, and certain thresholds elevate that to "local news", "national news", or "international news". Sure, it might seem horribly cold to think of people as having value, but they do. A simple metric is to take their annual income, and pretend it is an interest payment on some cash in a bank account. Typical westerners are hence worth a few million dollars. Lebanese refugees? A few tens of thousands each, if that. The billionaires in the sub added up to more than the refugees on the boat. That's it. It's that simple. If Trump, Bezos, Gates, or Musk die, it's guaranteed to be global news, one hundred percent. If ten ordinary people die? Eh... nobody cares. To put things in perspective, in the same period of time that the sub was being searched for, about a week, globally we lost: About 25,000 people to car crashes. About 30,000 to preventable diseases. About 50,000 to industrial accidents and work-related diseases. And a mere 5,000 or so to the war in Ukraine. That boat near Greece? It barely rates. It's a statistic.

tlb 3y ago

HN isn't intended for discussing things proportional to their moral value. It's for discussing things that are intellectually interesting. This story is interesting to many HN readers because of the technology involved (carbon fiber subs) and the entrepreneurial risk taking / hubris. There might be a good discussion to be had here about refugee ships, but you'd need to find an angle of intellectual interest.

mhh__ 3y ago
Sad to see the world solely in these terms.
contravert 3y ago
There is clear intellectual interest in comparing and contrasting why certain events receive outsized attention compared to objective outcomes (e.g. number of casualties).
flangola7 3y ago
What? Their comment was highly intellectually interesting. What are you even talking about?

dehrmann 3y ago

The sub story caught traction for the same reason Balloon Boy did in 2009: there's an element of the unknown and a rescue angle. Same as the kids in the Tham Luang cave. Sadly, refugee boats capsize all the time in the Mediterranean, and there's no ongoing drama.

mcpackieh 3y ago
Also, submarines are generally newsworthy even when they aren't going missing. The numerous media appearances the CEO did before the accident are evidence of this.