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The noise we make is hurting animals. Can we learn to shut up?
- QuantumNomad_ 7mo agohttps://archive.is/F7tiS https://archive.is/F7tiS
- stonecharioteer 7mo agoWe don't have compassion for fellow human beings. I don't think we will ever have compassion for animals who are sensitive to noise. Example: Diwali is a horrible time to be a stray animal in India. Heck, even my pets hate the festival. But humans will always be self obsessed and say it's for celebration. Sure.
- everdrive 7mo agoPer Blaise Pascal, no they cannot: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” We need to keep growing, building, making, taking. Some people seem to really love the bustle and creative destruction. I'm in my 40s, and I've always hated it. When I was a child, I wondered if when I grew up, I would fit naturally into the world the way that so many others seemed to. The answer was no. I don't know why people need to be the way they are. I don't feel comfortable in so many normal situations. The things that bother the animals bother me too, but for most people this is unthinkable in the same way that other modes of thought are unthinkable. (eg, when someone who thinks mostly in words learns that some people think only in pictures)
- BLKNSLVR 7mo agoI'd like to say that there may be some human cultures that are / were generally respectful to their environment and the animals therein, but it's hard to say how much that was an 'enforced' position based on their level of technological evolution. I think it's a fundamental rule that the 'rape and pillage' types will always overrun the non-'rape and pillage' types. Much in the same way the sociopaths are able to climb the corporate ladder with relative ease. The nature of nature, seemingly.
- andai 7mo agoAs a kid I remember wondering why all the countries that exist seem to be jerks. Why aren't there any nice countries? Then I thought about it for another 5 seconds and it made a lot more sense.
- Pay08 7mo agoI'd very much hesitate characterising countries as a whole.
- andai 7mo agoNo I mean if you set up a simulation where there's a bunch of entities who are chill and a bunch of entities who are not chill, and then you run the simulation... Wait a minute, that rings a bell! https://ncase.me/trust/ https://ncase.me/trust/
- Pay08 7mo agoBy that logic, every single human should be a psychopath by now.
- BLKNSLVR 7mo agoI think that's far from true, going by the simulation game thingy.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- BLKNSLVR 7mo agoThat game / simulation is fantastic. Thanks for sharing, I'm gonna pass it on at work. More than fantastic, it's beautiful.
- BobaFloutist 7mo agoCooperation usually beats out competition though. Which is why for all that things look bad right now, alliances of at least modestly liberal countries have handily dominated and out-competed most autocracies. And the autocracies that have thrived have mostly done so by liberalizing, at least a little.
- SamHenryCliff 7mo agoCase in point: Marc Andreeson denigrating introspection not only in his own life, but extrapolating that to the population at large. As Dr, Jung noted, healing happens in solitude. That’s one of the reasons that Alcoholics Anonymous really didn’t help me much. Sitting around broken people isn’t going to magically cause a “spiritual awakening” but in a few, nearly statistically negligible instances. Turning off Social Media from 10pm to 8am local time would be a great start toward the recovery of human interaction sabotaged by COVID. To put it another way, Grocery Stores which supply life sustaining nutrition are not typically open 24 hours. Comparatively speaking they are more “Good” than social media. As such, rein in the latter rather than expand the former (Wal-Mart finding open 24 hours isn’t worth it is an economic proof of concept here) and we can improve our collective ability to make progress.
- dang 7mo agoWhere did Jung say that healing happens in solitude? Do you happen to remember where you heard/read this?
- philipkglass 7mo agoThis was interesting enough to prompt an investigation. It looks like the idea comes from this letter that he wrote late in life: https://philosophics.blog/2021/08/01/the-futility-of-words/ https://philosophics.blog/2021/08/01/the-futility-of-words/ I don't know German so I can't search for the original with any facility.
- ofrzeta 7mo agoYou are not alone.
- oblio 7mo agoNice philosophising, but it's vehicles. Primarily cars, but not only. By far the most common and the loudest source of noise, especially in cities, are vehicles, again, primarily cars. During the pandemic it became painfully obvious how loud cars are. Every time a city closes down streets, the same thing can be noticed. It can be shocking to some, but even the most crowded places on the planet are quite silent when vehicles aren't around. There are some minor exceptions like concerts (duh!) or other huge public gatherings where the noise is the point. It's going to take a really long time to heal this wound.
- Tade0 7mo ago> By far the most common and the loudest source of noise, especially in cities, are vehicles, again, primarily cars. Hugely depends on the city. Where I live it's the cargo trains and airliners. Congestion is too severe for anyone to make significant noise, unless they have modified/dysfunctional exhausts or particularly large engines.
- oblio 7mo agoTrue, but the radius affected by airliners is generally much smaller. Once they're higher than a few thousand meters, you can't really hear them any more. Cargo trains, I imagine it's similar. > Congestion is too severe for anyone to make significant noise, unless they have modified/dysfunctional exhausts or particularly large engines. Large numbers of cars idling make enough noise to basically rival human conversations at regular speech levels. Anything above that (usually anything higher than 30kmph) makes it even worse. I'm not sure it's exponential, but I think it increases supra-linearly afterwards.
- dec0dedab0de 7mo agoNice philosophising, but it's vehicles. Primarily cars, but not only. Around here cars are more common, but quiet enough that I rarely notice. Trucks, motorcycles, quads, trains, and boats are all significantly noisier.
- duskdozer 7mo agoEven quite a distance away I hear constant noise from a highway. It's a bit surprising too just how loud and for how long you can hear the cars and motorcycles they mod to be even louder, even through walls and windows.
- Tade0 7mo agoYou would absolutely love Switzerland. Many things surprised me there, but it's the relative quiteness that did it the most. Trains arriving like massive ghosts, cars obeying the speed limit and not a single soul gunning it from the intersection. Meanwhile back home every night I can hear all kinds of "motoring enthusiasts" abusing their machines so that they won't hear their intrusive thoughts or something. It feels like a zoo in comparison.
- sentrysapper 7mo agoI experienced this in Japan and Korea as well. There are of course, neighborhoods where noise is tolerated but while I was there I noticed most commuters whisper conversations on their phone. The thought of blasting a call or music on speakerphone is unconscionable.
- luckys 7mo agoWhat about the impact of EMF pollution? The book "the invisible rainbow' goes into that, though I don't expect this type of position to be well received in HN. I find it very healthy that this type of "invisible" pollution gets at least some discussion, however. We have to start somewhere.
- Pay08 7mo agoIs that book actually based in science?
- luckys 7mo agoIt's a book that challenges some established views. If that makes it anti-science... It's up to a person whether they judge a book based only on a superficial understanding of it and without having read it. I recommend it. I can't promise you will like it or find it interesting or agree with any of it. I find it important enough to recommend to people when this type of subject comes up.
- Pay08 7mo agoA lot, I'd hazard the vast majority, of these things are pseudoscience at best (remember "microwaves will give you cancer"?). Does "challenging established views" means presenting hypotheses with empirical evidence or claiming that EMF is from Hell?
- scq 7mo agoNo, the author is a crank named Arthur Firstenberg, one of the original "microwaves will give you cancer" people.
- john_strinlai 7mo ago>It's a book that challenges some established views. this doesnt answer the question because you can challenge established views scientifically (i.e., using data and evidence and testing, etc.) or unscientifically by screaming vaccines cause autism or whatever nonsense directly in the face of (and contrary to) data, evidence, and testing.
- windex 7mo agoDuring the Covid lockdowns in India, I saw birds I had not seen in decades. It was amazing; the skies had cleared up, and nature truly was recovering.
- BLKNSLVR 7mo agoAnd humanity as-a-whole learnt nothing. Let's hope there's some more movement in the right direction as a result of _this_ crisis.
- jraby3 7mo agoThere will almost certainly be more pandemics and they'll probably be worse. The world is getting smaller, and what takes a super high end lab these days (in terms of virus creation) will be done by college students in 20 years.
- vlachen 7mo agoI firmly believe that William Gibson nailed it with the Jackpot in his recent books: nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves.
- xnx 7mo agoI'd like to include "humans" in the list of animals being hurt by anthropogenic noise.
- wewewedxfgdf 7mo agoWhenever there's a beaching of whales I wonder if a submarine has sailed past blasting sonar so loud the whales have to jump out of the ocean to their death.
- andai 7mo agohttps://archive.ph/F7tiS https://archive.ph/F7tiS
- andai 7mo agoAlso noise pollution. Also pollution pollution...
- throwpoaster 7mo agoThe noise we make is hurting _us_. Decibel levels in cities are unconscionable.
- KempyKolibri 7mo agoLol have they seen what we do to animals for taste pleasure? It's not a question of "can we learn to shut up?", it's "will humans ever care enough to even want to learn?".
- outime 7mo agoThe amount of suffering people go through because of noise is pretty insane (some more than others). The most common situation I see in Europe is living in poorly insulated apartments with neighbors who act like they're in a pub 24/7.
- naasking 7mo agoThe noise we make is hurting humans too.
- setnone 7mo agoThe amount of noise on this website is ridiculous
- fnord77 7mo agoHurting us, too. i have to wear noise cancelling headphones all day to filter out noises from outside my apartment
- duskdozer 7mo agoIt's horrible. Often feels like the lawn guys plan things out so that as soon as one finishes, the next starts up, to make sure there's no time to be free
- PunchyHamster 7mo agothe deers and boars running around in my neighbourhood seems to DGAF
- hombre_fatal 7mo agoWe breed animals into the most horrific existence imaginable just to eat them by the trillions. But here we're concerned for the aural experience of some birds.
- dec0dedab0de 7mo agoI noticed this directly a few weeks ago. I was camping with a friend pretty deep in the woods, but at a campground. About a half a mile away there was an RV running a generator, which was annoying as hell, but not the end of the world. Then in the middle of the night, while we were stargazing the generator turned off, and we could noticeably hear the wildlife adapt to the change. Some got quieter, but mostly it was wildlife returning to the area. As if the sound from the generator was a forcefield keeping everything away, or at least hidden. That last part is what really opened my eyes about the noise polution from datacenters
- ddmf 7mo agoI'm autistic and have misophonia and hyperacusis, not to mention auditory processing issues which mean I'm more likely to lock on to a noise rather than what I actually would like to listen to. There's so much noise around - it really does tie in to the "social model of disability" in that a lot of my issues would disappear if environments weren't so hostile - that includes noise, smells, and lights.
- black6 7mo agoNot mentioned in the article is that whales were once able to communicate globally, but the low frequency noise generated by maritime traffic killed the "Whale Internet."
- dlcarrier 7mo agoI've never seen an article mention researchers so many times, without mentioning any actual research. They really made their point, by publishing an article that is nothing but noise.
- jlaternman 6mo agoThis is a completely paywalled article. Not being able to read the argument, I'll just note that dogs are horrible sound polluters. Possibly only when they have bad human owners, but I'm pretty sure they're biologically evolved to mark territory by sound pollution, and should learn to shut up, too.