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Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

It's a big boardwalk feature at a high-profile park and sees hundreds of visitors a day with vanishingly rare incident. It triggers the same kind of passive trust that people bring with them to Disneyland or a dinner theater, where guests default to thinking everything is part of the show and needn't warrant actual concern. It's the same reason people get too close to the wildlife there.

It's thoughtful of you to encourage people here to be more vigilant, but the lack of that vigilance is a direct outcome of the park trying to culture an experience of safety and wonder instead of danger and awe (in its traditional meaning).

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Exactly. It's very well developed and seems an incredibly "safe" environment. People aren't in the mindset that there could be danger (even if they should be).

It takes processing time before people even realize that this isn't normal. Also there's social proof all over. When it goes off people look around, see that nobody else is bailing, so they assume things are ok. It takes a little time to override that tendency and get people to start moving.

"People aren't in the mindset that there could be danger (even if they should be)."

This could be said of life generally. It seems like very few people even have a minimal level of situational awareness while walking to the mailbox or walking through a store.

And having that situational awareness at all times can easily result in exhaustion.

Not really. There are different levels of situational awareness. One doesn't have to be on high alert. Just being alert enough that you hear a pallet jack coming down the cross aisle is more alert than half the people seem to be.

As GP said, it’s hard to maintain that situational awareness on a constant basis.

However, it may be prudent to tune in when you are in a new environment or you hear a new sound in an environment you’re used to.

"or you hear a new sound"

What you've just described is situational awareness.

Maintaining condition yellow "relaxed awareness" should not be hard to do at all.

Maintaining any level of vigilance is still more exhausting than maintaining none at all, even if at some personal level you believe it shouldn't be hard to do.

Do you look before you cross the street? Do you turn to see what a beeping noise is that is approaching you in a store? Do these things exhaust you?

It's super easy to have basic awareness. Crossing the street is a great example because you need the awareness that you're near a street. Then the awareness to see if it has a crosswalk/light/etc. Then what the light status is (if applicable). Finally looking for cars.

People who lack any awareness at all are the ones you hear about falling in manholes because they were looking at their phones.

And insensitivity. That's why we put one person on guard so everyone else can go 'shields-down'. Dangerous situation requires an assigned responsible person whose job is to be heads-up for that time and empowered to raise alarms, order people back etc. I guess if this is some kind of "nature spectacle theme park" you need someone permanently around who is an expert on the situation and knows when to call it.

> minimal level of situational awareness

"People don't pay for things they don't plan on using."

> while walking to the mailbox or walking through a store.

Traditionally _not_ dangerous activities.

Being near, or crossing, streets are traditionally dangerous. There are plenty of lawsuits from people getting hurt in stores every year. People who think they don't need to pay attention to what's around them in those situations are just ignorant.

>It's a big boardwalk feature at a high-profile park and sees hundreds of visitors a day with vanishingly rare incident.

It is also important to consider the context of the park itself. Roughly half of the world's known geysers are in Yellowstone. One of the primary reasons to go there is to see all the hydrothermal features. It is easy to watch this video from your laptop and know it is dangerous, but if you saw this explosion an hour after seeing this[1], the danger would likely be much less obvious.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/L5a0zinKGA8

At least when I last visited Yellowstone, the place was full of signs and stories about how people have died (and IIRC, their bodies were never recovered) from trying to swim in the colorful fun-looking pools of water, or from kids and pets wandering off. I don't know what else they could do to add more "danger and awe" apart from planning on having some sacrificial tourists every day. People are just generally bad at perceiving or respecting abstract danger.

Never walk alone.

I'm not sure if you're commenting on Yellowstone specifically, national parks and wild areas in general, or simply the everpresent risk from our heads being ~6ft above the ground and kept aloft by one hell of an inverted pendulum problem.

But that also adds to the same effect! Their moral is to stay on the boardwalk and don’t stray off from it. Their morale is to look out for your kids and pets that they do the same. Which equates boardwalks with safety. Which, as an approximation is kinda true. But then something like this happens which undermines the assumptions under that approximation and if you are still using it as a heuristics you can be in trouble.

> People are just generally bad at perceiving or respecting abstract danger.

Maybe? But also, all the yellowstones hydrothermal features look like the gods have cursed the land. If you were just galavanting through the forest and you come up seeing that without any prior knowledge or park rangers to assure you you would say “oh, hell no” and you would turn around. The park cultivates a sense of safety otherwise it wouldn’t be a park.

> If you were just galavanting through the forest and you come up seeing that without any prior knowledge or park rangers to assure you you would say “oh, hell no” and you would turn around

I think you're assuming much more individualism in the primitive dynamic than actually existed. As I said, individual humans are terrible at judging danger. There was an article posted a few days back about collapses while trenching for construction, and the difficulties of getting people to take that risk seriously until it actually happens.

So at the state you're envisioning, I'd say it's more like others in your tribe telling you to stay away from those weird holes in the ground, because some tribe members had already been killed by them. And the contemporary dynamic is more like an extreme scaling up of that, with a much more nuanced understanding of the dangerous mechanisms.

Similar issue was at play in the 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption in New Zealand (which, sadly - unlike today's Yellowstone explosion - caused numerous deaths and serious injuries). The visitors were made to feel safer than they actually were. The tour operators were complacent, and were later found negligent of having an inadequate safety regimen in place. Too much trust, too little vigilance, human memory too woefully short compared to geological event timescales.

Agreed.

Jurassic Park keeps coming to mind. It must be safe as long as you observe the signs, because it's an institutionalized park, right?

I don't know at what point I, as a first-time visitor to such a park, would start to question whether what I was witnessing was unusual or just part of the show.

Very well articulated. The key part is “passive trust.”

Doesn't matter. People need to wake TF up. Even Disney world can be dangerous. I know the NPC meme is dehumanizing but FFS people make it so hard sometimes.

I'm a FL resident (firmly NOT republican), Goto Disney Parks once or twice a month. It's amazing how people there will walk just inside a doorway and stop, or be in the center of a walkway with a group of half a dozen while oblivious to the mass of people around them. It's common to see people stand as a group blocking the entrance to attraction queues or even just entering the park they don't have their pass out before they get to the podium or they scan their pass wait a few seconds and then put their right index finger on the reader, both slow things down alot. Oddly those people are the ones you come across later in the day that insist on standing so close behind you in queues that shifting your weight will make you bump into them, it seems strange people don't grasp there's nothing to be gained from being close enough to smell what the person in front of you had for breakfast.

It's more common than you would think to come across a wild turkey(those bastards deserve the annual culling), deer, geese, coyote, a few months ago there was a black bear in tom sawyers island(they closed off a third of the park until it was captured). A few weeks ago I was leaving the magic kingdom and was going to walk from the main parking lot monorail station over to the bridge toward the Polynesian resort to the parking lot(I loathe the trams, prefer walking). I was just rounding the walkway and came across a snake that was upset about something in the center of the walkway. I think it was just a black snake, but I have a phobia for that particular type of animal. I reversed and took a different route. I have actually seen snakes a few times over the last couple years around the Polynesian resort, turkeys encounters are very common at the campground.

People think that because the parks are very safe as far as public places go that everything in the Disney bubble is "safe". If you're in an area where you aren't familiar with the local wildlife you should always err on the cautious side. But generally people are oblivious to anything around them.

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