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Comment by probably_wrong | Hacker News Reader

As a seasoned traveler, both with and without purpose, I feel the author is erecting a straw man tourist that fits no real person. "No, I don't mean those who travel with purpose, nor those who actually appreciate the place, nor those who follow through with a life-changing experience, nor those whose year will now be more bearable thanks to the memories made during the trip, nor those who think they got something out of it. I mean the other ones".

I get the urge to dunk on those who are "doing it wrong" (hello Instagrammers blocking the way), but I'd need to have a long conversation with someone before labeling them "unworthy of traveling". And some of my fondest memories are of people and places I wouldn't have met at home - hard to enjoy a sunset next to a gorgeous cathedral on a cliff when your city is 100 years old and flat.

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Travel/tourism is what I like to call "rudeness in aggregate". What I mean with that is that single individual people are doing nothing egregiously wrong as such, but above a certain number all combined create a strong negative ("rude") effect.

The most obvious example of this in context of travel are these huge cruise ships. No one is really doing anything wrong with that, as such, but craptons of tourists descending on your comparatively little city or town can become quite disruptive (as I've experienced first-hand as a resident).

There's quite a few problems like this, from small to large. Humans don't seem very good at taking "collective responsibility" for these sort of things, "because I'm doing nothing wrong", which is true, but also not.

It’s weird to see downvotes on this comment. I think it is without question that me traveling to, say, Yellowstone is just fine but not if too many people do so each year. The damage done would ruin the place.

At a higher level I think the issue is overpopulation combined with ease of travel. We cause too much damage.

Question: how do you see downvotes (or any votes) on a comment? I use news.ycombinator.com but all I see is when the downvotes are large enough to gray out the comment. I often see people talking about upvotes and downvotes as though they can see a number. I’m just wondering if I may be “doing it wrong”.

You are not doing anything wrong, you can't see points for comments that are not your own.

Thanks for the confirmation.

When I commented the comment was grayed out. That was the only indication I had that there were downvotes.

Ah, thanks.

> It’s weird to see downvotes on this comment.

I saw it stand at 0 (i.e. 1 downvote) shortly after I posted it; I don't know if it went lower than that, but probably not. A single person downvoting something shortly after it was posted can make something appear "as if it's downvoted", but more often than not it's just a single person. I wouldn't put too much stock in it.

You might think of it as a tragedy of the commons.

Certainly, there are many who rely on the "rudeness" of the travelers for their livelihood. New Orleans comes to mind, when I say that people who live there may not appreciate the tourists, but know that many of the things they do appreciate (dining, arts, etc) would not be there, but for the tourist. Luckily, the peak influx can be avoided while enjoying the fruits the rest of the time.

As a kid working in a fast food joint, whenever someone would notice a bus of any sort pull into the parking lot, the cry of "bus!" sent everyone into oh-shit mode. I imagine a cruise ship pulling into a small tourist town dock is similar but much larger.

Ordinarily I disagree with this kind of thinking, but I live in Edinburgh, for some reason I hate that the old town now feels like a theme park, though I'm not sure why. Especially given that during lock down I walked around it a lot and missed all the tourists. Makes no sense.

It's about the number of people. Less than 5% is fun and allows you to meet all sorts of people from various places, at 5-15% it's already a bit more mixed, and at >15% it becomes disruptive to every-day activities and the place no longer feels "yours".

I'm just making these numbers up because I don't have a good way to estimate them, could also be ">50%" instead of ">15%". But that's what it comes down to.

I think COVID really highlighted the contrast; first it was a slow increase that you don't really notice directly, then suddenly none, and then suddenly a huge spike again. e.g. Edinburgh roughly doubled the number of tourists from 2012 to 2019[1] which, in spite of being a fairly large change, you probably don't really notice when spread out over a 7 year period.

[1]: visits to Edinburgh castle is probably a reasonable proxy: https://www.statista.com/statistics/586822/edinburgh-castle-...

Thats interesting about the visits to Edinburgh castle, probably very accurate. Feels accurate too. Around 2009 or so Edinburgh was pretty "dead" I remember work mates complaining about it, so much one of them moved to Glasgow. Now we have the opposite problem.

>single individual people are doing nothing egregiously wrong

Because you included the word "egregiously" I suppose technically you are right, but only on a technicality. A small "wrong" at the individual level becomes "egregiously" wrong at the population level.

- one person eating food in the streets in Japan isn't egregious, every tourist doing it is.

- one person being loud in a church in Italy isn't egregious, all of them is.

- one person touching some old Australian rock art isn't, every tourist doing it is.

When you consider your actions as a tourist, you have to consider a million people doing the same. Anything else is being a bad tourist.

Everyone makes mistakes; I tend to be forgiving.

For example "eating in the street is rude" is one of those things that's just a foreign concept to many people outside Japan. I just so happen to know about this from a YouTube video I once watched, but if it wasn't for that I could see myself doing it. Hell, even with that I could see myself just forgetting because it's such an alien concept to me that this is considered rude.

I was more saying when a tourist considers their actions. Not if. Of course not everyone knows every social idiosyncratic curiosity of countries they visit.

But "I'm only a tourist, it's ok" leads to the egregious "tourists are bad" concept.

I think in the US at least, travel has an even deeper aspect of ritualized behavior or religiosity in the positive sense of those concepts. A pilgrimage for people who don't believe in anything.

Even someone who takes a 20 hour flight to take photos for Instagram is having a unique life experience. They are going to have experiences worth telling stories about. Certainly more than the person who doesn't leave the house.

Yeah, I don't think Ive read anything as dismissive and cynical as this piece.

I found myself trying to see their viewpoint, trying to be critical of my own experiences as a traveler and I kept failing to do so. What a horrible narrative they're embracing.

Dismissive and cynical writing in The New Yorker.. never!

> I don't think Ive read anything as dismissive and cynical as this piece.

About par for the course for the New Yorker, in my experience

Nothing really matters due to the amount of coal being burned in places like China. Your vein efforts to reduce your personal footprint in North America are largely pointless.

Edit: Lots of coal defenders in here. It is absolutely ridiculous to be burning coal in 2023. But hey, perhaps the US could focus on reducing its own coal usage. Go nuclear! My point is that your trip around the world is a drop in the bucket.

A non-negligible part of this coal is burnt in order to produce things exported to North America (among others), therefore by buying less...

Right, non-negligible. And if those mass-consumers of electricity switch to clean energy it would be great. But a lot of dirty energy is used for heating homes in colder regions on an individual basis.

China manufactures things to send to North America.

This is like saying “Nothing really matters due to the millions of people in our countries that also vote making our vote worthless so don’t bother voting”. If we all thought like this the world would be a worse off place.

Sure, if you ignore population size and accumulated past emissions, it's easy to blame China and sleep peacfully.

> hard to enjoy a sunset next to a gorgeous cathedral on a cliff when your city is 100 years old and flat

Just get a pair of those Apple VR goggles.

Is it the same? No. Is the difference worth destroying the planet? Hell no.

It's not the individual who should be blamed for the dire state of the planet.

Ironically, we can blame them more, the more we blame them.

You think that VR goggles aren’t destroying the planet as well with their manufacturing? Its also pretty bad.

I say this as someone who owns and enjoys my Quest 2 VR headset, in part to watch 3D videos of nature scenes and walks in various places. I just also know it isn’t without an environmental cost of its own.

Thankfully I am already old so I won't live in this world you propagate. The last thing I ever want is to live life dreaming of being somewhere rather than being able to go somewhere.

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