{"id":3726,"date":"2018-04-19T20:51:11","date_gmt":"2018-04-20T01:51:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=3726"},"modified":"2019-01-28T15:15:54","modified_gmt":"2019-01-28T21:15:54","slug":"summer-of-the-shark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=3726","title":{"rendered":"Summer of the Shark"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometimes a single word or phrase is enough to expand your mental toolkit across almost every subject.  “Averaging argument.”  “Motte and bailey.”  “Empirically indistinguishable.”  “Overfitting.”  Yesterday I learned another such phrase: “Summer of the Shark.”<\/a><\/p>\n

This, apparently, was the summer of 2001, when lacking more exciting news, the media gave massive coverage to every single shark attack it could find, creating the widespread impression of an epidemic—albeit, one that everyone forgot about after 9\/11.  In reality, depending on what you compare it to, the rate of shark attacks was either normal or unusually low<\/em> in the summer of 2001.  As far as I can tell, the situation is that the absolute number of shark attacks has<\/em> been increasing over the decades, but the increase is entirely<\/em> attributable to human population growth (and to way more surfers and scuba divers).  The risk per person, always minuscule (cows apparently<\/a> kill five times more people), appears to have been going down<\/a>.  This might or might not be related to the fact that shark populations are precipitously declining<\/a> all over the world, due mostly to overfishing and finning, but also the destruction of habitat.<\/p>\n

There’s a tendency—I notice it in myself—to say, “fine, news outlets have overhyped this trend; that’s what they do.  But still, there must be something<\/em> going on, since otherwise you wouldn’t see everyone talking about it.”<\/p>\n

The point of the phrase “Summer of the Shark” is to remind yourself that a “trend” can be, and often is, entirely<\/strong> a product of people energetically looking for a certain thing, even while the actual rate of the thing is unremarkable, abnormally low, or declining.  Of course this has been a favorite theme of Steven Pinker, but I don’t know if even reading his recent books, Better Angels<\/em><\/a> and Enlightenment Now<\/em><\/a>, fully brought home the problem’s pervasiveness for me.  If a self-sustaining hype bubble can form even over something as relatively easy to measure as the number of shark attacks, imagine how common it must be with more nebulous social phenomena.<\/p>\n

Without passing judgment—I’m unsure about many of them myself—how many of the following have you figured, based on the news or your Facebook or Twitter feeds, are probably some sort of epidemic?<\/p>\n