Live data from Hacker News

Humanity wasted 14,526 years watching Gangnam Style

wastedhumanity.com

31–40 of 47 posts

Re: Humanity wasted 14,526 years watching Gangnam Style

#31
post #29

The world is all about trivialities today and escapism (let's not face reality). Especially in the West. Young men and women (in general) don't really mature until their mid 30s and some never do. We have an entire generation of people distracted every 30 seconds by fart apps, juvenile videos and self-photos in the bathroom. We need more engineers, doctors and lawyers and serious thinkers. Maybe I'm just getting olde…

You have a terribly misinformed honest opinion. Maybe you should go out more?

Re: Humanity wasted 14,526 years watching Gangnam Style

#32
some people dont get humanity. thats 14,526 years worth of people all over the world appreciating a cultural meme and from a country they didnt know much about. talk about breaking down barriers and cultural stereotypes. the motherboard became more powerful in the long run.

Re: Humanity wasted 14,526 years watching Gangnam Style

#35
> The Empire State Building took only two years to build.

Um, the site is counting man-hours for YouTube videos, but I know there was more than just one guy working on the Empire State Building.

According to Wikipedia, there were 3,400 workers on the project, so the correct comparison would be 14,526 years to 6,800 years. And I bet I had a lot more fun adding my 15 minutes to Gangnam Style than I'd have adding 15 minutes to build the Empire State Building.

Re: Humanity wasted 14,526 years watching Gangnam Style

#37
Well, this analysis simplistically does length times views, deliberately ignoring the fact that hardly all Youtube "views" go for the full duration. Youtube has analytics that will show an average watching duration of 1-2 minutes for most music videos.

And of course there's opportunity "cost". Presumably a fair fraction of that 14,000 years just replaced watching other Internet videos or other inanity instead. It's not like we'd reclaim 14,000 years of productivity by never having had Gangnam.

And people multitask, watching a video in one window while doing something else. Or just play it in the background for the music, not even watching the video. We wouldn't count every Winamp or iTunes play of the song as the same wasted time.

Re: Humanity wasted 14,526 years watching Gangnam Style

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen Star Wars (and neither did any of my friends) but I own 3 TVs. I watch a shitload of TV shows.

This article (and the phenomenon it descibes) is likely why the GP mentioned people who don't have TVs: http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mention... So if you want to determine how much time you have 'wasted' related to the video, add up the time spent saying how you haven't seen it. Edit: There is no anger involved, other than maybe a little at being called angry. :) It is just pointing out an asp…

[deleted]

Re: Humanity wasted 14,526 years watching Gangnam Style

#39
a bit arrogant as other people point it out but also makes a wrong comparison! WW1 lasted six years but the time wasted was much more, multiply it by the number of people involved (the soldiers alone were 68 millions) and the time spent on reconstruction and you got a much higher value, in the order of hundred of millions years.

Re: Humanity wasted 14,526 years watching Gangnam Style

#40
These are kind of false comparisons. It's comparing man-years spent watching Gangnam Style against years spent building the Taj Mahal. There's a huge difference. Divide the number of years given by the population of planet Earth to get the number of years the entirety of humanity wasted on Gangnam Style (it's something like 0.00000207 years - off by 11 orders of magnitude). Or multiply the number of people who built the Taj Mahal by the number of years they spent building it to get the number of man-years they spent. I'd guess around 1,000 people built the Taj Mahal. That's 21,000 man-years, even more than was spent watching Gangnam Style.

Of course, if you added all the numbers for all the stupid youtube videos, memes, worthless news articles, facebook posts, etc. together, then you'd probably get something terribly depressing. My guess is some tiny fraction of humanity actually sustains the rest of the species. They are the (much less than) 1%.

Post reply on HN