Summer of the shark

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...

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

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?

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 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.

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.

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[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.