News Article: Scary? You Bet It Is

["jenday1" <jenday1@EMAIL.MSN.COM>]

I read this opinion pieced in today's Washington Post, and thought I should

pass it along.  If you substitute nuclear power for shark, I think you will

find the parallels interesting.  To view the entire article, go to

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27513-2001Aug31.html



-- John



John Jacobus, MS

Certified Health Physicist

3050 Traymore Lane

Bowie, MD 20715-2024

jenday1@email.msn.com (H)



Scary? You Bet It Is



By Fred Barbash



I started investigating sharks late in the spring -- before one bit off

8-year-old Jessie Arbogast's arm at Pensacola Beach, before all those

attacks in Florida. The reason was that my family and I had had our own

encounter with a pair of six-footers just off the beach at Emerald Isle,

N.C.



>From a fishing pier about 30 feet above the water, teenage boys were hurling

mullet heads at the sharks. The creatures, in turn, went into a feeding

frenzy, diving and swooping and lunging at the bait with amazing grace, not

to mention chilling ferocity. This was happening right off the beach, where

swimmers couldn't see them. The whole spectacle was drawing quite a crowd.

And we could certainly see why. My family and I were mesmerized.



And just a bit frightened.



It's not that we were literally threatened. It's just that, from that moment

on, every time I took my 6-year-old son into the surf to go boogie boarding,

my mind kept picturing him as the beasts' quarry instead of those mullet. I

made a few calls and tried to find out from people at the local aquarium

what sort of risk those sharks represented (I never figured out what variety

they were). And I got largely reassuring responses: There had been no bona

fide shark bites in that area in recent memory, I learned, but that's not to

say there wouldn't be one in the future. That said, my comfort level was

nonetheless shattered, and our remaining 12 days at the beach just weren't

the same.



In the months that followed, as shark attack followed shark attack, I lost

interest in marine biology. But I developed a new fascination with the shark

apologists, fish experts, risk analysts and statisticians who came out of

the deep to ridicule our fears, hurling statistics at us, insisting on the

infrequency of shark attacks and demonstrating at the same time their own

misunderstanding of basic human emotion.



I found out, for example, about elasmobranch guru (he knows about sharks,

skates and rays) George Burgess of the University of Florida, who operates a

Web site (www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/Sharks/ISAF/ISAF.



htm) much of which is devoted to defending sharks from the ignorant with

statistics that show how much more likely we are to be struck by lightning

or bitten by a squirrel than attacked by a shark.



But my favorite expert was Samuel Gruber, professor of marine biology and

fisheries at the University of Miami. He appeared on the front page of The

Washington Post, and elsewhere, to remind us that "when it comes to the

probability of being hurt by a shark, more people are likely to be killed by

pigs, by coconuts, you name it."



Why did I not find this reassuring? Why did this not dampen my fear?



My fear, the marine biologist would undoubtedly tell me, was a Fred problem,

not a shark problem. Statistically speaking, he would almost certainly say,

I should have been worrying more about a pig attack than a shark attack. To

which I would respond that I happened to be visiting an ocean beach, not a

farm; and my dilemma was not whether to wallow in a pigsty but whether to

take my son out in the surf.



In fairness, I'm sure Professor Gruber used the pig to dramatize his point.

The man's clearly got a sense of humor.



Not so John Allen Paulos, a math professor writing last weekend on the op-ed

page of the New York Times. Paulos, the author of "Innumeracy," saw in our

shark panic yet another failure of American education and the news media.



Had we only mastered "lowly arithmetic," we would understand the foolishness

not only of our concerns about sharks but about forest fires, the West Nile

virus, deep vein thrombosis from sitting on long-haul flights, air rage and

abduction by a stranger. None of these even comes close, statistically, to

the problem of alcohol abuse, Paulos noted. We are making the world "seem

much scarier than it is. . . . Often a little arithmetic," he concluded, "is

enough to counter a lot of anxiety."



Now, I have long admired risk analysts. They help us allocate resources in a

sensible sort of way. But let's face it. There's a disconnect between them

and us that is frustrating to both -- a failure to communicate.



This disconnect stems from two difficulties: While they deal in

probabilities, we are driven by improbabilities; while they live in a world

of statistical means and averages, we live in a world of real people and

real emotions.



Let's start with the probabilities. Contrary to the calm-mongers of academe,

it is not frequency that scares most people but infrequency. The less the

chance of something bad happening to us, the more horrible that very

something seems -- and the more we fear it.



That's why ordinary people built nuclear bomb shelters in the 1950s, even

while driving the most dangerous cars ever to roam the highways.



Conversely, the less likely a wonderful outcome, the more desirable it seems

and the more we crave it. That's why the number of people playing Powerball,

as we saw last week, rises dramatically as the pot of money grows, despite

the nagging voice of statistical reason that tells us there is about as much

chance of winning the jackpot as there is of finding Elvis living in Loudoun

County.



This very human phenomenon represents a risk assessor's nightmare. The more

the experts proclaim something unlikely, the more people tend to focus on

it. If shark attacks really are so rare -- so rare as to be newsworthy --

it's hard to keep your mind off them the next time you take a dip in the

ocean.



This may seem irrational. But that's only because we've improperly

identified what it is people are really worrying about when they seem to be

worrying about what the risk analysts gravely inform us are "the wrong

things."



The prospect of one of my family being eaten by a shark was not the only

thing that bothered me when we were at the beach this year. What really

bothered me was that we'd gone to the beach for a relaxing vacation and,

instead, I was tense.



Yes, what we really fear is fear itself, which, as Franklin D. Roosevelt

truly understood, is perfectly rational.



When I lived in Britain in the mid-1990s, I tried to explain this to some

Londoners. They thought it hilarious, and irrational, that people from

Washington might avoid visiting London for fear of an IRA bomb when their

chances of getting mugged at home -- in what was then still thought of as

the "murder capital" of the Western world -- were far greater than their

chances of getting bombed abroad.



My British friends failed to understand that it was less the explosion that

the tourists feared than having to worry about the explosion at a time when

they wanted a carefree holiday in London.



Is it rational to be afraid of fear when that fear has little foundation?

That's arguable.



But there's always a first time, isn't there? As it happens, I have never

been mugged in Washington. But an IRA bomb did explode a half block away

from our home in London, shaking our windows and our peace of mind.



Which brings me to the other disconnect. Statisticians know only the past.

And they know it only as an aggregate, which represents no one, or no one in

particular. Indeed, the likelihood of any single person's life experience

conforming to this aggregate is probably itself pretty slim -- and we all

know it.



Take a look at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis' Web site

(www.hcra.harvard.edu),  and you will find a "Risk Quiz" that demonstrates

this point perfectly. The risk of dying of heart disease, it tells us, is as

high as 1 in 385; while the risk of dying from drowning is just 1 in 65,116.

Those risks change dramatically, you know as well as I do, if you eat

nothing but roast beef and french fries or if you enjoy sailing every

weekend but can't swim. The nice round numbers that the risk analysts bandy

about to demonstrate just how foolish our behavior is often don't make much

sense when you think about your own life.



As I said, I didn't get interested in sharks -- or shark attack

statistics -- until our vacation at the beach. At that point, I wasn't your

average Joe. I was Fred, father of a 6-year-old who had been playing in the

surf close to where sharks had been feeding  on fish from young boys. I

didn't get interested, I'd argue, until my risk of being attacked by sharks

had probably increased considerably.



The propaganda of the investing industry provides a fine illustration of

statistical fundamentalism. Tens of millions of Americans invest in the

stock market because experts display statistics showing that the "average"

investor who bought and held a representative sampling of stocks for 50

years would have average annualized returns higher than any other form of

investment.



But this average investor does not exist. And how many existing investors

will buy and hold anything for 50 years? Most people don't have money to

invest in the first 10 or 15 years of their careers. And if they did, why

would they necessarily hold a "representative sampling" of stocks?



Finally, if, at the end of that 50-year period, the market crashed, they

surely would have been better off in government bonds.



This has created an intriguing dichotomy. The literature of the investing

industry is extremely rational. It tends to cite the long-term statistics as

a way of reassuring potential customers that it is okay to be in the stock

market as long as the investor is thinking "long-term."



But veteran stock market fund managers, when asked privately for their

thoughts, are extremely emotional. "If someone doesn't have the stomach for

the stock market," they always say, "they shouldn't be in it. If they can't

sleep at night worrying about their stocks, they shouldn't own them."



The same applies to sharks, as far as I'm concerned. The statistics may be

benign. But if worrying about sharks keeps you awake at night when you're at

the beach, don't go near the water.



<em>Fred Barbash is a former investing columnist for The Washington

Post.</em>



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