Thread by @Coyoteblog

When it comes to creating fear, one of the media's preferred techniques is to bring attention to tail-of-the-distribution events, even those down to the 6-sigma level, and portray them as somehow characterizing the mean.

I have years of immunity built up to this technique from following the climate debate. I have seen all-too-many occasions when the media extrapolates from a single data point, like a hurricane, into implied trends in mean behavior.

This works on a couple of levels--first, most media consumers cannot differentiate between the frequency of media coverage of a certain event & the underlying frequency of the event itself. Increased coverage of, say, hurricanes creates a perception that hurricanes are increasing

A great example of this observer bias effect and media coverage is the summer of the shark, where increased coverage of shark attacks led to an impression attacks were rising when in fact they were falling.
forbes.com/sites/warrenme…

The other reason this technique works is most Americans can't differentiated between relative risks or even understand probability and distributions. Let me give one example.

Hitting a 100-year high for temperature for a particular day feels really rare and noteworthy. But...

On any given day, on average, 1/100th of the earth's surface will (on average) hit a 100-year high for that day. This means an area about half the size of the US will, on average, be experiencing a 100-year high temperature. Every single day.

For the Earth's population, something weird that happens to one person might be portrayed in the media as a threat. But with 8 billion people, even a 6-sigma tail of the distribution event would hit 27,000 people. Assuming 50 million COVID infected, 6-sigma is about 170 people.

So when the media tracks down 5 or 6 people who may have been reinfected, for example, recognize they are trying to imply mean behavior of this disease based on a nearly 7-sigma event.

I don't think it's any surprise there's a lot of overlap between climate skeptics and COVID response critics, as we in climate have seen these crazy media fear tactics and bad science for literally decades.