From 3/07/12 - Nearly 6 Million Years of World of Warcraft Healthy for Players' Brains
By one analyst's calculation, the 11 million or so registered users of the online role-playing fantasy World of Warcraft collectively have spent as much time playing the game since its introduction in 2004 as humanity spent evolving as a species-about 50 billion hours of game time, which adds up to about 5.9 million years.
they're entitled to their opinion thats its 'wasted'. but really. wise enough to decide for other people how their time is best spent? is time spent being entertained wasted? or is time being entertained by gangnam style wasted but say, time reading 'in search of lost time' not?
Well it isn't a zero sum game. Who's "productive" 100% of their time? And can keep it that way without any relaxation?
I would think that music you like counts as excellent relaxation and can help you achieve more afterwards.
Additionally, they are comparing "man years" to "calendar years". I would think it took more than 4 man years to build the titanic. Stupid post.
It's only "wasted" if you got no value out of it. If you thought it was entertaining (which, presumably people who watched it many times did) then it's no more of a waste than time spent listening to The Beatles or Beethoven, relative merits aside.
The comparison to completion time of the Empire State Building, the Great Pyramid of Giza, etc, are dishonest. Those weren't completed by a single individual, so it doesn't make sense to compare it to all time spent by each person watching the video.
I was thinking the same thing. First one I saw was for the Eiffel Tower, which took 300 people 2 years, so that should actually show as 600 years, not 2.
Not to mention the time required to design it, the time spent by workers to collect the raw materials used to build it, the time spent in factories to produce a finished metal product that could be used in construction, etc.
Attempting to calculate the man-hours that went into almost any project of scale is absurd. There are far too many factors to consider.
For a fair comparison, you should also count the time that people "waste" visiting those imperial derelicts.
In the case of the Eiffel Tower, it has received over 250 million visitors. Assume that people spend an hour per visit, that's around 30,000 years wasted visiting the Eiffel Tower.
Now that's a super interesting snippet. Despite existing for far longer than Gangnam, the Eiffel Tower has only entertained twice as long total as Gangnam. Technology has democratized access to experiences.
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 aspect of the human condition. (I stopped watching TV for a few years around the time this article came out and this article gave me some extra self awareness.)
I haven't seen any of these films, either. I don't see how it makes anyone different. Most people watch these films as part of a social experience, anyway.
If you think Pop culture is a waste, then why not calculate 90%+ of YouTube multiple by # of views, time people spent in front of the television since its existence, as well as movies, Facebook, twitter, Instagram, Computer games, etc.
In fact, most of the time and bandwidth being spent on "The Internet" is a waste - according to this theory.
I hate the arrogance and pretence of this site as a concept. I'm far more productive than pretty much anyone I know, but I also need downtime to recharge.
It's not about productivity. Humanity could spend these 14,526 years listening to J.S. Bach, a genius whose talent found no match in the human history and yet dedicated as much as humanly possible of his life to music.
I love Bach; love, love, love Bach. Both of Gould's recordings of Goldberg variations, plus the Kimiko Ishizaka recording from the Open Goldberg Variations project (early backer).
That said, Gagnam style brought a smile to my face and added a bounce to my step; there's room for many things in culture and not all time is wasted, even "downtime". I'm sure Bach took breaks too.
And yet I find that his work is not the thing I need most of the time. And even when I want some Bach, I mostly resort to the excellent "jazzy" interpretations of Jaques Loussier[1].
Gangnam Style is brilliant. You can watch it dozens of times, always discovering something new. It also spawned a large number of extremely entertaining spoofs.
It would indeed be a sad world if we had peaked culturally at Bach. Fortunately, we haven't.
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 older, but that's my honest opinion.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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%.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 98.7 ms ] threadBy one analyst's calculation, the 11 million or so registered users of the online role-playing fantasy World of Warcraft collectively have spent as much time playing the game since its introduction in 2004 as humanity spent evolving as a species-about 50 billion hours of game time, which adds up to about 5.9 million years.
http://kotaku.com/5891421/nearly-6-million-years-of-world-of...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4624090
TLDR my response: don't be so judgmental.
Additionally, they are comparing "man years" to "calendar years". I would think it took more than 4 man years to build the titanic. Stupid post.
Attempting to calculate the man-hours that went into almost any project of scale is absurd. There are far too many factors to consider.
In the case of the Eiffel Tower, it has received over 250 million visitors. Assume that people spend an hour per visit, that's around 30,000 years wasted visiting the Eiffel Tower.
Now that's a super interesting snippet. Despite existing for far longer than Gangnam, the Eiffel Tower has only entertained twice as long total as Gangnam. Technology has democratized access to experiences.
People are also amazed when I tell them I haven't seen Avatar, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. I guess I'm just different than most people.
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 aspect of the human condition. (I stopped watching TV for a few years around the time this article came out and this article gave me some extra self awareness.)
If you think Pop culture is a waste, then why not calculate 90%+ of YouTube multiple by # of views, time people spent in front of the television since its existence, as well as movies, Facebook, twitter, Instagram, Computer games, etc.
In fact, most of the time and bandwidth being spent on "The Internet" is a waste - according to this theory.
That said, Gagnam style brought a smile to my face and added a bounce to my step; there's room for many things in culture and not all time is wasted, even "downtime". I'm sure Bach took breaks too.
Gangnam Style is brilliant. You can watch it dozens of times, always discovering something new. It also spawned a large number of extremely entertaining spoofs.
It would indeed be a sad world if we had peaked culturally at Bach. Fortunately, we haven't.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x6jzKpqeuw
The terms arrogance and pretense were used for a reason.
Not to mention building cultural bridges...
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 older, but that's my honest opinion.
After all, what is the point of the time we have, other than to enjoy it?
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.
I'm betting that everyone on Earth went to the loo today, and also averaged 90 seconds.
Humanity wasted 19,889 years shitting today.
It took only 21 years to build the Taj Mahal in India!
What a waste.
While we're on the subject, you might find this article entertaining: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groom_of_the_Stool
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.
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%.