You got me curious and I wasn’t satisfied with any of the existing responses to this. I agree that public sightings would certainly be correlated with whale population, but it would have plenty of other compounding factors, so it’s a pretty poor way to estimate population.

The Internation Whaling Commission will do sighting surveys do get an actual population estimate. This is with groups of specific people going out in boats and/or planes to spot them and using those numbers to extrapolate population number with certain confidence intervals. I’m not sure how they do the extrapolation, but I can’t be bothered looking into it further.

I did also find this plot using population estimates, including a projection to 2030 (made in 2019)

https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/humpback-whale-population-hunted-to-near-extinction-recovers/11609318

I’m guessing we would have the capability to gather more accurate measurements, but there’s probably just no funding for that and the current sighting surveys are good enough for what we need…

David McRaney has some really good content on this topic. I recommend listening to his podcast episode called How Minds Change, about deep canvasing. He has a whole book by the same name, if you want to read more about it.

Edit: I should summarise the key points I’ve taken from consuming his content:

• Facts and figures don’t change minds, stories people can relate to are much more effective
• Changing minds can take a lot of time
• An approach known to have a decent success rate is to have a calm discussion where both people are trying to understand each other and find some common ground while following the steps of deep canvasing

Having said all that, it’s best in 1 to 1 conversations. Not sure how effective you can be on the internet, but I do think it’s best to try to show understanding of other peoples views and steel man their arguments (opposite of straw man) while sharing your own views.

Well there wouldn’t be much point to the Great Chinese Firewall if lots of uncontrolled information was flowing in and out through social media.

… the time parents spend with children has gone up for both women and men. Indeed, one study found that today’s generation of moms spend nearly twice as much time with their kids compared to moms 50 years ago.

As a dad who is struggling to juggle work, kids, housework and mental health all at the same time. I think this is a real problem that needs work on a societal level. Why are both parents needing to spend so much more time looking after their kids? Surely kids weren’t just neglected previously? I’m really not sure whats changed, but there are so many parents under so much stress these days.