There's a lot of waxing poetic and conjecture in the write up but the most interesting take away for me was the HYENA article which (at first glance of the abstract and conclusions) seems to say that the presence of certain kinds of noise will have underlying physiological impact, raising levels of cortisol, that you're not consciously aware of.
While not every study ever published is automatically granted validity just by putting "abstract" and "conclusion" at the top, I do prefer the part where someone tried to measure something.
As it stands, I think your response and the article are equal parts conjecture based on anecdotal evidence except for the one linked study that the article seems to over generalize. That doesn't make either useless, but it does make me interested in other physiological effects that might be occurring without my conscious ability to recognize them.
There are poorly understood neurological disorders that can cause hypersensitivity to sound, which can present as being easily distracted by sound. See misophonia as an example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia).
I'm not saying everyone who yells at you for being loud suffers from this condition, but when you say, "Stop blaming externalities for your inability to concentrate," it smacks of telling the clinically depressed to just think happy thoughts and cheer the fuck up.
