One of the reasons that few people swim in deep water is because there are some number of sharks there.
Most problems reach equalibriums. Some problems have a very strong S-Curve effects. "How deep is the water" and "probability of dying of a shark attack" has a sigmoid curve, where as soon as you go into water deep enough for sharks to actually swim, the danger goes from "Unheard of if not impossible" to "Potentially Life Threatening but within acceptable risk territory". Once out there, it keeps going up.
People don't swim in deep water because deep water is not generally accessible. One of the reasons that deep water is not accessible is because deep water also contain sharks. These have reached an equilibrium.
Second example of this fallacy:
"Helicopter parents" is a commonly cited problem [1]. Parents are overprotective of children. The rise of helicopter parenting has coincided with a reduction in child mortality rate from non-natural causes. Wouldn't that indicate that helicopter parenting is working? The answer ranges from "No" to "Maybe". Children killed by car accidents correlates with a decline on overall accident rate - But much of that is driven by initiatives like MADD, which has worked to improve general auto safety as the most effective way of protecting children. These factors can be compared to stoichiometric math - They are trending towards equilibriums, but probably have not yet reached them, and as other reactions happen around them the setpoints they are trending to change.
>One of the reasons that few people swim in >deep water is because there are some >number of sharks there.
I can't help but think even if there were no sharks at all the amount of people swimming in deep water would not increase that much, because I find it likely that the other causes of people not swimming in deep water have a much greater effect on how many people actually swim in deeper water.
Also there are people now who swim in deep water specifically to swim with Sharks.
