
Summer of the shark - alberto_ol
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3726
======
setgree
I agree with the general point here and it's a good concept to keep in mind.

Where Scott and I disagree is that 'sexual harassment in silicon valley'
strikes me as a different phenomenon: preference falsification [0], or
'private truths, public lies' (which is what Timur Kuran called his book about
it). It's a model for why some regimes seem to fall very suddenly, and the
intuition is: even if people publicly don't oppose something, they might
privately _all_ (or mostly) oppose it, but could be waiting for a certain
threshold of their peers to say something before they speak out. When someone
does speak out, you see a sudden cascade of dissenting opinion from people who
were just waiting for these first mover(s), whereas it would have seemed
before that everyone supported the status quo.

In this model, all a revolution takes is for someone to get fed up enough to
make the costs of dissent seem really low (like Mohammed Bouaziz, the vendor
who set himself on fire in Tunisia in 2010). For the subject at hand, I think
Susan Fowler was someone whose threshold for speaking out was zero people, but
once people saw her dissent, they too were willing to voice their private
beliefs.

So people aren't going actively _looking_ for sexual harassment -- rather,
it's always been there, and now we're seeing private dissent made public.

I readily admit that one could make this same argument about undocumented
immigrants and crime.

[0]
[https://www.jstor.org/stable/2232928?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2232928?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)

~~~
simplicio
Yea, the post seems a little confused. I don't think most people talking about
sexism in Silicon Valley or racism at Starbucks or crime by illegal immigrants
are claiming a new or rising epidemic. They're claiming to be drawing
attention to long existing problems. Of course one can argue the degree to
which these problems are real or not, but Scott seems to be trying too hard to
find recent "Summer of the Shark" examples that will push peoples political
buttons, at the cost of confusing what he's talking about.

People discussing voter fraud, school shootings and campus speech issues, on
the other hand, do tend to claim there's a recent "epidemic" regarding the
issues, and thus seem better examples of what Scott want's to discuss.

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Houshalter
Very true but I don't know if people can use this reasoning rationally. I know
a well known news site that gets posted here often. That ran a big piece on
how rare terrorism is and how you shouldn't worry about it at all. But then
ran a bunch of stories freaking out about mass shootings. I'm sure the reverse
situation probably happens on conservative outlets.

~~~
pjc50
"Terrorism" by foreigners in the US _is_ incredibly rare. Mass shootings are
roughly weekly. [https://www.abc15.com/news/data/mass-shootings-in-the-us-
whe...](https://www.abc15.com/news/data/mass-shootings-in-the-us-when-where-
they-have-occurred-in-2018)

~~~
Houshalter
Almost all of that is inner city gang crime. And looking at those reported
incidents, most of them failed to kill even a single person. The big random
shootings that make the national news are _extremely_ rare and make up a tiny
percentage of all murders.

The deaths from terrorism work out to around 200 per year. Which is on the
same order and possibly greater than the mass shooting deaths. And that
doesn't even take into account the massive amounts of money and effort we
spend on keeping that number low.

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unwind
What does "Motte and bailey" mean in this context?

I looked it up[1] and it's about defensive architecture in 10th-century
castles. How does that fit in a "mental toolkit across almost every subject"?

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-
bailey_castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_castle)

~~~
vinceguidry
[http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-
bric...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-
motte/)

Once you start recognizing it, you see it everywhere.

~~~
unwind
Thanks. That article strangely failed to explain (at least to me) the meanings
of the words in the medieval castle sense, but it explained the way its used
elsewhere.

~~~
michaelt
The simplest way to understand the castle is with an image:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=motte-and-
bailey&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=motte-and-bailey&tbm=isch)

You'll notice they have two defended areas - an easy-to-defend keep on raised
earthwork, and a harder-to-defend courtyard ('bailey') covering a much broader
area.

------
ShabbosGoy
I fear it will only get worse. Dopamine engineering bypasses the rational
processes of one’s mind, hijacking one’s emotional apparatus that is ill-
prepared to deal with these kinds of clickbait.

The truth of the matter is, the West is in a cultural, political, and economic
decline. It is a bitter pill to swallow, but once it is swallowed, one becomes
immune to these forms of psychological manipulation. What’s left when you have
nothing to lose?

------
aaavl2821
> Somehow, we need to figure out a trick to move this cognitive error from the
> periphery of consciousness to center stage

To get meta: is not this suggestion potentially a result of the "summer of the
shark" bias? If not for all of the media reporting on fake news, election
interference and Facebooks bad behavior, would the author still make this
recommendation? As others have said on many posts about the Cambridge
analytica scandal, we've known for years Facebook collects and shares all our
data; why is it an issue now but not then?

We only have so much cognitive space and cant mentally solve every cognitive
bias we have, and can't solve every problem in the world. what empirical
evidence is there that this "summer of the shark" phenomenon deserves to be
center stage vs any other problem? Not saying it doesn't deserve more
attention than say school shootings or the cognitive bias of loss aversion for
example, just wondering whether there's evidence to confirm this

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red_admiral
Terrorism may be a very rare cause of death, all things considered, but that's
little comfort to the widow of a firefighter who died on 9/11\. For the same
reason, someone who just quit their job over sexual harassment by co-workers
might not be too moved be talk about how much of a problem it is or is not
overall.

The closest I can think of a non-partisan example is talking about how safe
flying is as a mode of transport, to someone who had the incredibly bad luck
to lose a loved one in a plane crash. Is there a name for this kind of thing?

I agree that at the organisation or nation level, you want to invest your time
and money based on better evidence than media reports about sharks. But I also
understand that at the individual level, you care more about issues in
proportion to how they affect you or those close to you.

~~~
watwut
While we can count terrorism rates very accurately, it is not nearly the same
with sexual harassment or bias. Terrorism is very public and hard to conceal,
sexual harassment is hidden and costly to talk about if you are typical
victim.

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YeGoblynQueenne
>> The risk per person, always minuscule (cows apparently kill five times more
people), appears to have been going down.

As usual with reported statistics of this sort, this one ignores the
fundamental difference between the "raw visceral horror of being eaten alive
by a very big fish" [1], compared to being kicked or crushed by a cow, which
is a stupid, but not a horrible, way to die.

__________

[1] Quote from a National Geographic article. Somehow, I remember the quote
because it was so much to the point, but I have no way to find the article
again.

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rev0lutions
i was almost on board until he mentioned steven pinker, who unironically
believes that world war I and world war II were merely statistical aberrations
in our otherwise highly progressing phase of humanity o_O

------
mindslight
It's Eternal Sharktember.

