Read an editorial in today's NY TIMES. Very instructive on this issue:
[A] simple truth of human existence is that it is vastly easier to
amplify fear than it is to assuage it. Consider the shark attacks that
have occurred in Florida, Virginia and North Carolina this summer. The
temptation is to call them not merely shark attacks but ["a spate of shark
attacks" or "a wave of shark attacks," or even "a summer of shark
attacks." The temptation is [also to say that they have "culminated" in
the fatal attacks, separated by only two days, on David Peltier, a
10-year-old boy, in Virginia Beach and Sergei Zaloukaev, a 27-year-old
graduate student, on the Outer Banks.
These words imply that there is something more than coincidence at
work, and it is that something more, as well as the sharks themselves,
that we tend to worry about. What that language teaches us to fear is
being [caught up in a trend of shark attacks rather than being the victim
of an isolated incident. But with the exception of the attack on Mr.
Zaloukaev's swimming companion, these have all been isolated incidents.
They are grouped together only in time and by the fact — self-evident as
it sounds — that every victim was in the water when the attack took place.
It is the [dull duty of science to remind us of such banalities. Shark
experts, statisticians and people who do not fear numbers have remarked
that you cannot talk sensibly about the shark attacks this summer unless
you talk first about the sheer number of humans who flock to the beaches
in the summertime. Shark attacks will drop off precipitously now that
Labor Day has come, because there will be less human flesh in the water to
be bitten. This sounds callous, because it does not personalize the shark
attacks that have already occurred. For the families and friends of David
Peltier and Sergei Zaloukaev, of course, the attacks — and their grief —
are extremely personal. Every one-in-a- million tragedy reminds us that
statistics always look impersonal until you become a statistic. There is
always a chance, perhaps obscured by the daunting fact of so many
beachgoers, that some new pressure on sharks, like a decline in natural
prey, is driving them inshore. But at present, the idea of an
environmentally driven shark-attack trend is no more founded in fact than
the hypothesis of one conservative commentator that the whole thing is the
fault of Bill Clinton, or at least of tighter shark-fishing limits passed
during his presidency.
Twenty-eight children in the United States were killed by falling
television sets between 1990 and 1997. As the Statistical Assessment
Service, a nonprofit organization that analyzes the media's use of
statistics, points out, that is four times as many people as were killed
by great white shark attacks in the 20th century. Loosely speaking, this
means that "watching `Jaws' on TV is more dangerous than swimming in the
Pacific." Life is full of things that carry more risk than swimming in the
ocean. Most of them are inevitably the byproducts of daily life, like
falling televisions and car accidents, because daily life is where we
spend most of our time. It may lack the visceral fears aroused by the
unlikely threat of a shark attack, but it is also far more lethal.
Make it a good day.
--Louis--
Louis Schmier www.therandomthoughts.com
Department of History www.halcyon.com/arborhts/louis.html
Valdosta State University
Valdosta, GA 31698 /~\ /\ /\
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