Hacker News Reader

Comment by darkerside | Hacker News Reader

The choice of speed seems consciously intended to make it seem more frantic than it is. It's too fast to make out what's going on. If they played it half speed, it would be closer to reality and also easier to see and understand, so why is it this fast?

View on HN

Or this was the speed things came out when converted to video.

I think attributing this to malice is really not a great move, given that we can only guess here and a lot of people without advanced video knowledge wouldn't make this a conscious choice unless it is much too slow or fast

Another simple hypothesis: a frantic-looking animation is more likely to get upvoted on Reddit so if 5 people posted animations at different speeds, a frantic-looking one might have a better chance at surviving

I often default to arguments like this. But I make an exception when the mistake is both inaccurate and seems to favor the conclusion chosen by the author. They should have realized this and slowed the video to avoid even the appearance of attempting to create a false implication. In my opinion.

That's why I say "seems" instead of "was". I don't want to assume it's on purpose. But I'm sure they had control over the speed of the animation. If they didn't make it look frenetic on purpose, they were incompetent in their attempt to make it describe reality.

If they didn't mean it to seem that way, the responsibility is on them to fix it. This is only my opinion, but I'm sure I'm not alone.

What's your opinion on weather map/satellite images then? You are aware they're not real time and the storms/wind isn't actually moving that fast?

Are the people who make them incompetent? Or would they simply be useless if played back in real time - since you would hardly be able to see any movement at all.

Wow, not sure if I'm being unclear, but I'll try again. This specific animation is issued at a speed that I think is faster than is useful. I think it is more useful and interesting to see the detailed interaction between the whale and an individual boat at a granular level. As played, you see the whale ping pong around between ships, but it's hard to get much of a sense for what is going on. I can't think of another reason for the video being that speed except that they want to imply that the whale is panicked (also the subtext of the study, so not exactly a complete stretch), or that it was an actual oversight that just so happened to make a covert emotional argument that favors their conclusion, which I consider a scientific faux pas.

If you speed up a video of pedestrians at cross-walks it suddenly becomes pedestrians running across the street to avoid being run over by cars going way too fast.

Sure playing it at half speed works be closer to real life. But playing a week sped up to 90s isn't going to be much different.

I'd much rather see focus on the whale and its interaction with individual ships. This doesn't show any of that nuance at all, and I don't know why. (But I have ideas)

Half speed... so we take half a week to watch it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com