I think it was in "Futurama" where someone said, "if you've done everything right, it will be like you've done nothing at all." Y2K is a great example. We don't know for sure if it would have been that bad left unchecked, but all the work done to fix the problem ensured that nothing happened - and now the conventional wisdom is that it was always overblown if not an outright scam.
"Duck and Cover" in the fifties is a similar example. Because it was so intertwined with the Red Scare (which in turn was so overblown that people now *underestimate* how many Soviet moles were in the US government, but that's another post) it's written off as Cold War propaganda meant to make people think nuclear war was survivable.
Indeed, if you were near Ground Zero it wouldn't help at all. But if you're further away from the blast, debris, building collapses and shattered glass are your most pressing concerns. Hiding under a desk could literally save your life.
I can add to the aviation fears with a very real data point. If you compare traffic at Heathrow Airport New Year's Eve and New Year's Day 98/99 and 00/01 with 99/00 those two days were down about two thirds on the year's either side.
I feel like it’s cheating to use “the media hyped up a thing as scary” as your bad thing for a year. That’s what the media does! It’s how they sell papers and clicks! It’s not a property of any particular year.
First, I would argue (and have argued, in Risk) that thinking of media and the public as two entirely separate things is a mistake. To a considerable extent, the media reflect public thinking (not surprisingly, as journalists are human, just like the rest of us, and they live in the same communities as the rest of us). So to the extent that the media expresses alarm about something, there's like at least *some* correspondence between that expression of alarm and real concern in the public. Second, the evidence I presented here is not media hand-waving. It is (mostly) direct measures of public opinion. It's what people said, in other words. And whatever the role in the media in shaping that opinion, remember the purpose of this exercise is not to examine whether people's worries were reasonable or not. It is to look at the effect of hindsight bias. And for that purpose, people's feelings, whatever their cause, are the baseline measure.
Media coverage reflect subjects of popular concern in some sense, but using it as evidence surely biases us toward overestimating the salience of bad or shocking things. And I don't trust your assumption that people now would recall a lack of concern over Columbine or Y2K.
The Y2K opinion polls have 77% of people in 1999 thinking that Y2K will cause minor or no problems. If asked, I suspect I would have thought there was more concern than that, not less! After all, more of today's audience has been convinced of bigger problems (2020 election fraud) with less evidence.
Likewise, it appears from your stats that Columbine made only 18% of parents worried about their kid's safety the next day (compared to the previous year), diminishing to 10% four months later. I guess you wrote the book on it, but again -- if asked now, I'd have expected it to cause a bigger increase than that, though from a lower baseline. The 1977 and 1998 numbers are the real shockers, for me.
So I just don't find this exercise persuasive about the direction of hindsight bias. Surely you could do it equally well in the opposite direction -- ask people for the worst year they can think of and then point to good things that happened nonetheless.
So for the record, I am a GenX software developer and I was mildly worried about Y2K, to the point that I took my young family up into the mountains to celebrate new years. We packed some extra food and my shotgun, just in case.
I'm a little more worried about January 19th, 2038. I am sure that most critical infrastructure will be fine, but there are a *lot* of embedded devices all over the world using Unix Epoch time, and I have no confidence that they'll all be replaced.
I think it was in "Futurama" where someone said, "if you've done everything right, it will be like you've done nothing at all." Y2K is a great example. We don't know for sure if it would have been that bad left unchecked, but all the work done to fix the problem ensured that nothing happened - and now the conventional wisdom is that it was always overblown if not an outright scam.
"Duck and Cover" in the fifties is a similar example. Because it was so intertwined with the Red Scare (which in turn was so overblown that people now *underestimate* how many Soviet moles were in the US government, but that's another post) it's written off as Cold War propaganda meant to make people think nuclear war was survivable.
Indeed, if you were near Ground Zero it wouldn't help at all. But if you're further away from the blast, debris, building collapses and shattered glass are your most pressing concerns. Hiding under a desk could literally save your life.
I can add to the aviation fears with a very real data point. If you compare traffic at Heathrow Airport New Year's Eve and New Year's Day 98/99 and 00/01 with 99/00 those two days were down about two thirds on the year's either side.
I feel like it’s cheating to use “the media hyped up a thing as scary” as your bad thing for a year. That’s what the media does! It’s how they sell papers and clicks! It’s not a property of any particular year.
First, I would argue (and have argued, in Risk) that thinking of media and the public as two entirely separate things is a mistake. To a considerable extent, the media reflect public thinking (not surprisingly, as journalists are human, just like the rest of us, and they live in the same communities as the rest of us). So to the extent that the media expresses alarm about something, there's like at least *some* correspondence between that expression of alarm and real concern in the public. Second, the evidence I presented here is not media hand-waving. It is (mostly) direct measures of public opinion. It's what people said, in other words. And whatever the role in the media in shaping that opinion, remember the purpose of this exercise is not to examine whether people's worries were reasonable or not. It is to look at the effect of hindsight bias. And for that purpose, people's feelings, whatever their cause, are the baseline measure.
Media coverage reflect subjects of popular concern in some sense, but using it as evidence surely biases us toward overestimating the salience of bad or shocking things. And I don't trust your assumption that people now would recall a lack of concern over Columbine or Y2K.
The Y2K opinion polls have 77% of people in 1999 thinking that Y2K will cause minor or no problems. If asked, I suspect I would have thought there was more concern than that, not less! After all, more of today's audience has been convinced of bigger problems (2020 election fraud) with less evidence.
Likewise, it appears from your stats that Columbine made only 18% of parents worried about their kid's safety the next day (compared to the previous year), diminishing to 10% four months later. I guess you wrote the book on it, but again -- if asked now, I'd have expected it to cause a bigger increase than that, though from a lower baseline. The 1977 and 1998 numbers are the real shockers, for me.
So I just don't find this exercise persuasive about the direction of hindsight bias. Surely you could do it equally well in the opposite direction -- ask people for the worst year they can think of and then point to good things that happened nonetheless.
So for the record, I am a GenX software developer and I was mildly worried about Y2K, to the point that I took my young family up into the mountains to celebrate new years. We packed some extra food and my shotgun, just in case.
I'm a little more worried about January 19th, 2038. I am sure that most critical infrastructure will be fine, but there are a *lot* of embedded devices all over the world using Unix Epoch time, and I have no confidence that they'll all be replaced.
I was living in St. John's at the time, so Y2K bug be damned, I wasn't going to miss ringing in the new Millennium on George Street.