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.
Which is still incredibly rare, considering the size of the country. I think the point being made is if you care about human safety, things such as alcohol, automobiles, cancer, dementia, etc cause vastly more deaths and injuries, but don't get the same mind-share.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know if he disagrees with you. I read his list as simply a list of examples he could think of where you might see someone describe something as "the rise of <problem>", regardless of whether it's a problem at all or whether it's always been a problem that is just now being called out.
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.
I believe, in this context, that he's not dismissing the reality of sexism in Silicon Valley so much as suggesting it's not worse than other industries but getting a lot more attention than other industries right now. The SlateStarCodex post he links to [1] is really worth reading and makes the same point more effectively.
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?
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
> 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
>> 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.
reply