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Comment by minimonk | Hacker News Reader

One of the important lessons I learnt from a lifeguard is that movies depict a very inaccurate representation of drowning. The movies would have you believe that drowning is a violent and noisy event when in reality it is an inconspicuous and silent event. The victim cannot shout or call for help when they are struggling to keep their nose above the water level.

Another important lesson I learnt that sometimes when someone is rescued from drowning, they are at the risk of secondary drowning which can occur during sleep after the accident. Especially, if a child looks very weak and tired after a drowning accident, it is important to keep the child under medical care for the next 24 hours. Never take the risk of the taking the child back home in such a case.

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Most depictions of things in movies are like that.

Films must show you something interesting, and watching somebody do trial and error painfully on a bash script for 6 hours is not as fun as a fast pace keyboard murder while screaming "i just passed 3 firewalls" with beautiful animations rendering on the screen.

If there is a camera, what you see is a lie. The difference between a national geographic documentary and cinema is just how big the lie is.

It's a bit insiduous actually, because some parts of the lie are subtil: rythm, speed, dialogs, personalities, agenda, resources... But they look real enough to make our natural social mechanisms trigger, and the lie then creeps into real life.

Like people now expect the police, the justice system, school or the hospital to behave in a certain way, and the reality is way less glamourous.

The chances we actually find, or even search for somebody that killed you (if it's not very obvious) are very low, not to mention a simple theft or ass kicking.

Most things are mondain and boring looking. That's why we are so fond of art.

And drowning is like most things.

Even national geographic documentaries are probably "lies" ... I just had the chance to get some basic insights in to evolutionary biology ... and boy is bloody mauling and devouring of prey just the tip of the iceberg.

Intraspecies rape and infanticide is pretty common out there. (Look up the penis of drakes (male ducks) and why it looks the way it does at some point)

Siblings competing for food with only a small percentage surviving.

The female tit (the bird ... not what you think) basically cheats so much that there is a possibility that none of the offspring is actually of the male that feeds them ...

The list goes on and on and on ...

> The female tit (the bird ... not what you think) basically cheats so much that there is a possibility that none of the offspring is actually of the male that feeds them ...

Pretty sure "cheating" and infidelity are largely human concepts. That's normal and natural behaviour for many species.

> "cheating" and infidelity are largely human concepts

It is normal behavior, yes. But it comes at the expense of the cheated on party. The term here is "parental investment" and is roughly how much energy a party has to invest in the offspring.

If the male tit builds the nest and provides food for offspring that is genetically not his it puts it at a disadvantage and it is definitely exploited by the female.

Again, "exploited"? Using that word in the context seems very... Off. It's not like the female tit is choosing to "exploit" the male. They're literally programmed to do that.

Think about it. In many species there is unequal parental employment. That's just how nature works. Is it really "exploitation" in the human sense of taking advantage of someone else?

>> Is it really "exploitation" in the human sense of taking advantage of someone else?

Yes. Obviously. And whether or not the exploitation is "programmed" is irrelevant. After all everything is programmed.

But. If we're observing as humans and it appears to us that the one creature is taking advantage of another, surely that's just our interpretation from a very limited understanding of their world?

I have no idea where I'm going with this, but that phrasing still seems off to me.

OT, but your usernames have a neat synchronicity.

Human behavior is no more complicated than that of anything else living. We just have more complicated ways to justify our actions.

And similar means to justify our distaste for some actions, as evidenced in this thread.

I don't think I understand your objection. You can model a lot of human and animal preferences fairly simply, based on axiomatic preferences like "wanting to survive and propagate your genes". Unwitting parental investment in a gene pool you don't share runs counter to this fairly basic and well-founded definition of utility, and it's under this premise that words like "exploit" are used.

Just upthread, "rape" is used in the animal context too. You could similarly apply your argument to that behavior, claiming that the term has moral baggage that's uniquely human, but I think it'd be just as wrong-headed.

Crazy how this topic on drowning led me to your comment and led me down a rabbit hole where I am now ordering The Evolution of Beauty, Prum and The Handicap Prinicple, Amotz. Thank you for this comment

Nice! "Animal Behavior: An Evolutionary Approach, Alcock" and "Evolution, Ridley" were mentioned in the seminars if you want to put some more books on the list :-)

I remember reading about some sort of project that was analogizing the economy to nature and talking about balance and I nearly blurted out that there is balance in nature because so much stuff dies all the time. People who want to make the economy more fair naturally want to do it without the equivalent of stuff dying all the time. But nature is not a good analogy for that. Nature as a whole is beautiful and tends toward balance, but it comes at a huge cost to individual participants.

If you ever watched Nat Geo tapes in grade school from the 80s, things were much more graphic (and interesting and informative IMO). Somehow Western society has become so sensitive to depictions of violence that even educational films regarding nature are effectively whitewashed.

Our reluctance to produce informative graphic media has given people an unrealistically optimistic view of nature and life. This has warped social values and policy to our detriment.

Another one - pretty much all nature footage doesn't come with quality (or any) sound. Nature documentaries are full of foley sound.

> Even national geographic documentaries are probably "lies"

That's exactly what the OP said.

"(Look up the penis of drakes (male ducks) and why it looks the way it does at some point)"

Not to one-up you, but anyone who's at it anyway, also look up the platypus mating behavior. Spoiler: it involves 4-headed penises.

What opened my eyes to all of this is when I saw a video of a seal raping a penguin. I knew nature was brutal, but that was an aspect I had never considered. Then I started noticing more and more information about it. Made me appreciate humans far more.

> One of the important lessons I learnt from a lifeguard is that movies depict a very inaccurate representation of drowning. The movies would have you believe that drowning is a violent and noisy event when in reality it is an inconspicuous and silent event. The victim cannot shout or call for help when they are struggling to keep their nose above the water level.

My daughter, when she was about 2, fell over in about 2 feet of water in a lake and it was completely and utterly silent. One moment she was there and the next she was under and reaching up at me, bubbles coming out of her mouth. If I had been even remotely distracted I never would have known that she had gone under.

When I was a kid I was swimming in a children's pool in our backyard with my two younger brothers. One of my brothers was afraid to go under water. At one point, I turned around and noticed that he was underwater. It looked like he was making swimming motions as people normally do. I was surprised that he decided to do it, given his fear, and just watched him for maybe ten seconds. After some time passed I got concerned and pulled him up. Sure enough, he was drowning and I was just sitting there watching him.

I learned that day how non-obvious drowning looks. I still feel bad about it to this day, even though he ended up being alright.

An important lesson to learn in general is that television and movies depict very inaccurate representations of everything.

Including sounds, which are almost universally added to the footage in a separate processing stage, and have no relation to what has actually happened on the stage itself.

Hence why every bird of prey ever shown in any movie ever has the call of a red tailed hawk.

And every jungle is full of kookaburras

Hah, have you got an example of this one? It's a very distinctive sound so it would be hilarious to hear it over a shot of some obviously non-Australian jungle.

This is so common it's on TVTropes:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JunglesSoundLike...

Wow, thanks. I'm not big on TV/movies but I'm surprised I missed this one completely.

And every explosion in space is really really loud.

War footage on the history channel was kind of ruined when I realized this.

Hold on, pornhub isn't a documentary service?

I never learned to swim. At age 14 I felt like someone pushed me into the river at noon time, sun was very bright and there was no one there but me catching fishes alone, I fell right into the river. I didn't drown I figured out how to swim out of instinct - I wonder how common it is. This is one of the least things shown in movies that some people can end up swimming on their own without having previously learnt it.

Where did the pusher go?

Goddamn, the pusher man.

Is there still water in their lungs? Why doesn't it get coughed out once they are out of the water?

The water (and chemicals) in the lungs irritate and damage the lungs, which causes inflammation, which causes fluids to build up in the lungs, which eventually causes suffocation.

"Secondary drowning" is another term people use to describe another drowning complication. It happens if water gets into the lungs. There, it can irritate the lungs’ lining and fluid can build up, causing a condition called pulmonary edema. You’d likely notice your child having trouble breathing right away, and it might get worse over the next 24 hours.

Both events are very rare. They make up only 1%-2% of all drownings, says pediatrician James Orlowski, MD, of Florida Hospital Tampa. [1]

[1] https://www.webmd.com/children/features/secondary-drowning-d...

1%-2% doesn't seem "very rare" to me.

What kind of intuition do you have about 1%-2%? I've a crappy grasp of probability. I'd say 1-2% is like being quite certain that you'll experience this or that within 50-100 tries/repetitions. That sounds rare to me. In case of life or death it's not a risk I'd tolerate, but I'd call it rare.

Even with a 99% probability, there’s about one chance in three that you wouldn’t experience it if you tried a hundred times.

How does that work?

The chance you don't experience it after hundred times is 0.99^100≈0.37.

Let's say you roll a dice with 100 sides. If you roll a 1, you die. If you roll anything else, you live. We want to know the probability you will die if you roll the dice 100 times.

One way we could do this is look at the probability you'll roll it on the first roll... then the probability you won't roll it on the first roll but you will on the second roll... and so on. But that's a lot of math.

The probability of an event (death) and its complement (not death) totals 1.0. So one way we can get the probability of death is 1.0 - the probability of life.

Okay, so the only way you'll live if is if survive all 100 rolls. Each dice roll is independent (surviving the first dice roll doesn't affect the second dice roll which doesn't affect the third). So each individual dice roll has probability 0.99 of survival. For joint probability, we can multiply these together. The probability of getting heads on a coin twice is 0.5 * 0.5 = 0.25. So in our situation here, p(survival) = 0.99, and 100 times means 0.99^100, to get the probability of survival. 0.99^100 = 0.36. 36% chance of survival.

The probability of death is thus 1 - 0.36 = 0.64. 64% chance of death.

The comment that prompted the question stated the opposite probability - 99% chance of death, not life. That changes the odds quite drastically.

Clear and concise. Thanks!

Counter question. How to calculate how many tries it would take to reach a specific probability for an outcome? For example, how many times do I have to roll the dice to have 90% chance of death? Due to my field of work, I'd solve everything by bruteforce, but I wonder what a more elegant solution could be.

Just solve the equation above.

0.99^n = (1-0.9)

n*log(0.99) = log(0.1)

n = log(0.1)/log(0.99) = ~229

My intuition comes from other uses of "rare" and "very rare" in medical fields.

"In Europe a disease or disorder is defined as rare when it affects less than 1 in 2000 citizens." [1]

""" In the United States, the Rare Diseases Act of 2002 defines rare disease strictly according to prevalence, specifically "any disease or condition that affects fewer than 200,000 people in the United States", or about 1 in 1,500 people. This definition is essentially the same as that of the Orphan Drug Act of 1983, a federal law that was written to encourage research into rare diseases and possible cures.

In Japan, the legal definition of a rare disease is one that affects fewer than 50,000 patients in Japan, or about 1 in 2,500 people.

However, the European Commission on Public Health defines rare diseases as "life-threatening or chronically debilitating diseases which are of such low prevalence that special combined efforts are needed to address them". The term low prevalence is later defined as generally meaning fewer than 1 in 2,000 people. Diseases that are statistically rare, but not also life-threatening, chronically debilitating, or inadequately treated, are excluded from their definition. """

[1] https://www.eurordis.org/content/what-rare-disease

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_disease

That's 1 in 2000 of the entire population. 1/100,000th of the US population drowns every year, which means that 1% of drownings has an annual incidence of 1/1million.

(This is annual vs lifetime but if you do the rough math under some basic assumptions, you end up easily within what you're defining as "rare")

Right, but I'm not going to nearly-drown 50-100 times in my life. I'd definitely put this in the "not worth worrying about" category.

Being a human and doing human activities carries a certain amount of risk. If we over-analyze things we end up either being too scared to do anything interesting... and if we start applying this "I"m scared of everything" mentality to parenting we fall into the "helicopter parent" trap which is even worse.

Being scared of being scared is also a thing. If water got into my loved one's lungs, I wouldn't take a 1-2% risk of them suffocating in their sleep. I only gamble with what I'm willing to lose.

Drownings are rare, I would say that 1-2% of something rare is very rare.

Sure. But given someone has drowned, a 1-2% of something happening should result in serious precautions being taken.

Said serious precaution is monitoring by a person.

Indeed, especially considering that this is "1%-2% of all drownings". It says nothing about how many people are suffering from this after a near-drowning and subsequently recover from a near-second-drowning. For all we know more than half of the near-drownings may end up with secondary symptoms.

Also we don't know how many near-drownings vs drownings there are. Lot of good statistical quiz questions in here.

"Is there still water in their lungs? Why doesn't it get coughed out once they are out of the water?"

No, it is not as simple as "leftover water from the drowning". Rather, due to the presence of the water in the lungs, which has been presumably expelled entirely, the interior of the lungs becomes irritated and inflamed.

This inflammation process produces it's own fluid which will slowly fill the lungs and "drown" you - especially while you are prone, while sleeping, wherein the fluid pools along the entire length of the lung, rather than just filling up the bottom of the lung.

It's a misleading term ...

Yeah this can happen because the bronchi in the lungs is covered with this "teflon" like non-stick coating that prevents the lungs sticking together when breathing out. When a person inhales water in a near drowning this coating might get washed away resulting in the bronchi to get stuck. This will reduce the breathing capacity of the organ could result in hypoxia. Therefore after near drowning supervision in a hospital is a good idea.

There was a video my fireman friend showed me a while back of two men drowning near a drainage pipe. There was a chunk of floating hardwood or something that they wanted for some reason, but neither could swim (I know, brilliant). The only violent and noisy parts of the incident was then frantically trying to swim back to the banks for about a minute. After that, they seem to lose all energy, go still, and sink shockingly fast, like rocks.

Do you know a single movie which accurately shows drowning?

Secondary drowning, while not shown on-screen, is an important plot point of the series The Affair.

They had those in Baywatch, although they claimed to be caused by saltwater.

But overall their message was the same, post drowning, go to hospital.

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