We’re gonna need a bigger … data set: Shark attacks and wicked problems

Ashley Kilgore:

This podcast episode contains details of death and injury resulting from shark attacks. Listener discretion is advised.

Daniel Duane:

I did a sort of simple calculation for the California coast, and I think what I came up with was that this was the equivalent of having, I don’t know, was it 125, 150 attacks on the California coast in a single summer and 50 fatalities. Just to sort of process the impact on the public mind. I mean, I think we’d be calling in the Navy SEALs. I don’t think American Life would just, “Wow, 50 shark attacks. Okay, well cool. Let’s just shut all the beaches in all of California.”

Daniel Duane:

Anyway, so that gives you an idea of how it was a … So then this raises the question for this society of how do we make sense of this? And that’s kind of what I meant about it was a case study. The real case study here, yes, there’s a case study about sharks, but there’s also a case study in a society facing a very confusing and complicated environmental crisis.

Ashley Kilgore:

All across the globe, every single day operations, research and analytics impact us in ways both big and small to save lives, save money, and solve problems. In this podcast, we take a look behind the research, behind the data, and behind these many incredible applications to meet the people whose inspiration, hard work and dedication are transforming our world. I’m Ashley Kilgore, host of Resoundingly Human, the podcast brought to you by Informs, the leading international association for OR and analytics professionals.

Ashley Kilgore:

So today’s episode will be a little different than most. We’re going to take a bit of a detour, but stick with me and I promise I’ll bring us back around to data science. I’m going to take us back in time a little, back to the first time I watched what was to become my favorite movie, Jaws. It was the summer between fourth and fifth grade, probably way too young to be watching a movie about a killer shark. And I was at a sleepover where the next day, after being thoroughly terrified by this movie, we went to the beach where, wait for it, a shark had washed up on shore. Needless to say, I spent much of the rest of that summer playing in the dunes. But it cemented in me an absolute fascination and, let’s be honest, fear of sharks.

Ashley Kilgore:

So fast forward a couple of decades to this summer. I’m on my morning run through the Pennsylvania woods far from any beach and listening to my newest podcast obsession: Réunion, Shark Attacks in Paradise, which is about a series of unprecedented shark attacks on the French Island of Réunion.

Ashley Kilgore:

All of a sudden I hear the host mention quote: “The totally fascinating academic journal Management Science.” That’s right, the Informs journal, Management Science. He’s referring to an article by UC Berkeley Professor Charles West Churchman titled Wicked Problems, and proceeds to lay out the Shark Attacks on Réunion as a wicked problem. I literally stopped dead in my tracks. I’m texting my coworkers, “Hey guys, the coolest thing ever just happened.” And of course, I keep binging the podcast.

Ashley Kilgore:

So needless to say, I am beyond excited to welcome Daniel Duane, award-winning journalist and author and host of my new favorite podcast, to talk about what exactly data science has to do with a series of shark attacks on a small island in the Indian Ocean.

Ashley Kilgore:

Dan, this is truly amazing. My worlds are colliding in our interview today. I’m bringing my own personal fascination and completely irrational fear of marauding killer sharks together with data as well as a lack of data and the impact this has on decision making, which is really, even beyond the management science reference, I think an underlying theme at the heart of your podcast. So Dan, welcome.

Daniel Duane:

Hey, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Ashley Kilgore:

So Dan, you’re a surfer and you mentioned in the podcast knowing about Réunion as a surfing destination back when you were a teenager. As these attacks were taking place, was this something the surfing community sort of as a whole was aware of since they really seemed to be an unprecedented phenomena, not just for the island, but on sort of a global scale?

Daniel Duane:

Yeah, yeah, totally. By the time the attacks started, which was in 2011, social media and the web and online surf publications and all that really had kind of taken off of course. And I guess another thing had happened too, which is that the surf is so good on Réunion. Réunion’s this tiny little island, this little speck out in the Indian Ocean, but it’s not that tiny. It’s like the size of Maui and it’s the Hawaiian island, and a lot of people live there, a lot of great French athletes are there. So Réunion had, starting in the ’90s, had sort of broken onto the global surf consciousness. People started to hear about it, there started to be pro contests there. Kelly Slater won a contest there. And then into the early 2000s, Réunion started to produce world-class surfers who would then go onto the world tour.

Daniel Duane:

There’s a guy named Jérémy Florès in particular. And currently some of the best female surfers in the world are, right now, are Réunion born surfers on both the short board and the long board tour. So it’s this little island very far away that has a very big presence in the global surf consciousness. And then it also has this, there’s one wave that is globally famous among surfers as one of the world’s perfect waves. It’s one of the world’s dream waves. It’s probably on the short list of the world’s top 10 waves that surfers like to dream about.

Daniel Duane:

So it’s in the public consciousness. And then when this series of attacks really started in 2011, Réunion was already enough in the public consciousness. This guy Jérémy Florès was famous enough. All of those things that the attacks started to be reported in the global surfing press. And then of course, the way the algorithm works these days, if you’re someone like me, surf news appears. It’s sort of like Johanne Defay took second, that the Roxy Pro Contest comes as a headline right above the FBI raided Maralago. And it’s the order of … So it really popped up. And as with all these things, there was a kind of cumulative effect. The first one is just an attack, “Well there was an attack.” The second one, “God, that’s kind of weird. There’s been another attack.” The third one … so yeah.

Ashley Kilgore:

So the podcast opens with the island described as a case study. Can you give a little background on the events you explore in the podcast and why it was so unusual?

Daniel Duane:

Yeah, so what I’m getting at in calling it a case study is that this is a really isolated human community. It’s this kind of synecdoche or world in miniature in a way. It’s like it’s this little green island way out in the big blue sea, but it’s also kind of an interesting microcosm of our larger Western world in the sense that it’s like 800,000 people live there. It’s not uninhabited. And there’s enormous income inequality. So there’s quite a lot of French wealth. It is just fully a part of France, the way Hawaii is to the US, it’s not a territory or anything, it’s just France.

Daniel Duane:

And so there’s huge income inequality. There’s also an astonishing sort of ethnic diversity that it’s really got to be one of the most diverse societies in the world. I mean, it has an ethnic diversity at the level of the way you feel on a subway train in Brooklyn at rush hour or something where you just feel like, “Wow, the whole world is here.” And there’s a long and complicated history behind that having to do with colonialism and then blah, blah blah.

Daniel Duane:

But okay, so it has this feeling of our diverse human community on our little planet, way out in space, suddenly facing this kind of crazy environmental threat. And then to characterize that environmental threat, and this is part of what makes the data aspect of this story interesting to my mind. In other words, I’m going to describe some complexities here, but the complexities are what I love because God is in the details. So it’s easy to say, “Well, there was out of the blue, all these attacks happened.” And that’s true.

Daniel Duane:

But what’s almost more interesting is the historical context that goes like this: the Indian Ocean in general has long had a reputation for sharks. Réunion Island itself, the sort of community there, that has long had a kind of communal, collective fear of sharks. There have been documented shark attacks going back to the French poet, Charles Baudelaire, who was there in the late 19th century. He didn’t actually get bit, but he apparently got very close to getting bit.

Daniel Duane:

And, to look at the historical record, there were occasional shark attacks. I’ll just give a historical data point here. But starting in the mid 1940s, that’s when the French government turned this territory into the equivalent of a French state. Once the French government did that, the French government started to invest quite heavily post Second World War in public housing, hospitals, schools, all these things. That brought a lot of jobs. But a lot of those jobs, let’s say teachers, professors, they built a university, they built a research institute, doctors, surgeons, those jobs did not go to locals. Those jobs went to highly educated mainland French people who were willing to move to this remote island in exchange for a big salary bump.

Daniel Duane:

So starting in the 1960s, this huge wave of educated French metropolitans started moving to Réunion. And a lot of them were moving for the lifestyle. Well prior to that move, the Creoles, and that term on Réunion just kind of means everybody who’s been there for a while, it does not carry any racial implication, although it sounds like it would, but it doesn’t. The Creoles historically had not played in the water at all on Réunion Island.

Daniel Duane:

Starting in about the 1960s when all these, and they have this term zoreilles for them. So when all these metropolitan white French zoreilles started moving to Réunion Island, well this also happened to be the middle of the global surf boom when the movie the Endless Summer was this runaway global hit. Gidget was probably in its fourth sequel, I don’t know, was Gidget Goes to Rome by that point.

Daniel Duane:

So these French metropolitans, 1960s hippie era, getting good jobs on this remote, beautiful, tropical island, brought surfboards and started to notice, “Wow, there is insane surf here. It’s so good. There’s all these incredible breaks.” And they started surfing all these different breaks. Well, that’s about when the historical record starts to document somewhat more regular shark attacks. It still on the order of one every two years kind of thing, which is not so different from California.

Daniel Duane:

There’s a spike in these shark attacks in the 1990s. So I can say much more about these spikes and the numbers behind this and geolocating these attacks and that sort of thing. But for now, I think I’ll under describe them so that you can get a feel for why these things were confounding to people, the imperfect data behind them.

Daniel Duane:

So it goes like this: in the 1990s, there starts to be more like one fatal attack every year or more than that. I think there were 11 fatal attacks in 10 years through the 1990s. That’s really not that great. People are getting pretty nervous. And then those attacks completely stop, and that sequence completely stops in 1999. And then from 1999 or 2000, roughly, through 2010, there are virtually no attacks on Réunion Island. It just stops.

Daniel Duane:

Surfing really booms. There’s surf schools, people fly down. It’s like we fly to Costa Rica to take surf lessons. People are flying from Paris to Réunion, they’re taking surf lessons. It’s beautiful. And it’s France. So you can take a surf lesson and then get a cappuccino on ice, have ahi tartare for dinner. It’s really a lovely lifestyle.

Daniel Duane:

So then through the 2000s, there are virtually no attacks, really very few. And absolutely none in the core resort zone. And we can get to this geographical distinction, that’s a sort of finer subtlety. And then in the year 2011, depending on how you count, whether you count some where people didn’t really get hurt, there were six attacks that year. And it was a horrible eruption of attacks. Like February, a French tourist gets a leg bit off. I guess, what is it, June, a French surfer, a local …

Daniel Duane:

So the first guy got his leg bit off was a tourist, but a good surfer who brought his family to the island and was actually planning to move there for the lifestyle, gets his leg bit off, changes his plans, not going to move there. But he survives. I think, is it June, July, another young local surfer, but a very local guy, out bodyboarding, attacked and killed by multiple sharks, body washes ashore, lifeguards have to approach this dismembered body, traumatizing hysteria.

Daniel Duane:

Another shark attack happens, but where a shark surges up on a kid who’s sitting on a surfboard and bites the surfboard and then thrashes the surfboard all around, but the kid is attached to the surfboard by an ankle leash. So he’s getting dragged around. That kid doesn’t get hurt.

Daniel Duane:

Few weeks later, month later, something like that, a very successful young professional surfer on the island, widely loved, he’s been on TV. I don’t know, I guess he’s 30 at this point or something, but he’s really a local hero, is out in really great surf, in very good surf, right in front of a lifeguard stand that is manned at the time by his best friends who are watching him when two sharks just literally start devouring him 50 yards from the shore, 20 yards from the shore. Friends jump in the water.

Daniel Duane:

And this is a very crowded, very popular, lovely beach. I mean this is like, I don’t know what the East Coast equivalents are, but this is something happening at one of the top beaches at the Hamptons midsummer on the 4th of July weekend or something. Or Malibu in California. It is the beach scene. Hundreds of witnesses, lifeguard buddies, swimming right out. Fins, multiple fins are cited, huge blood stains. Lifeguards get ahold of the body, get it partly ashore, get hit by big waves, the body disappears. And this guy’s body is never found.

Daniel Duane:

So that’s the year one thing. Anyway, and then it just keeps on going. So it’s both those initial horrors and then the continuity. There would be pauses with no attacks, then new attacks then pauses, then, anyway. So that’s kind of a ways. And then to sort of characterize, I think it’s important to think about the numbers a little bit here because in our American terms, I mean I think if there were just what I just described, I think if that happened on the Eastern seaboard in one summer, there would be massive shark hysteria and it would be the only thing that our news TV shows were covering.

Daniel Duane:

But the Eastern seaboard is how many tens of millions of people? So this was also happening in a very small, 20 mile stretch. It’d be like if all of the attacks I just described happened on one beach in the Hamptons or only in Cape Cod. Then I did the math at one point about, it’s a little fuzzy, but I just found a very simple way to do them. I don’t want to call this definitive, but the simple way, I did a sort of simple calculation for the California coast, and I think what I came up with was that this was the equivalent of having, I don’t know, was it 125, 150 attacks on the California coast in a single summer and 50 fatalities. Just to process the impact on the public mind. I mean, I think we’d be calling in the Navy SEALs, I don’t think American Life would just, “Wow, 50 shark attacks. Okay, well cool, let’s just shut all the beaches in all of California.” Anyway, so that gives you an idea of how it was a …

Daniel Duane:

So then this raises the question for this society of how do we make sense of this? And that’s what I meant about it was a case study. The real case study here, yes, there’s a case study about sharks. But there’s also a case study in a society facing a very confusing and complicated environmental crisis. And nobody can even agree if it’s even … There are major disagreements about whether it’s even happening. There’s whole sides of the society, they’re saying that there’s no spike in shark attacks. There’s always been shark attacks. Other people are saying, “Are you insane? Of course there’s a spike.” And then what do we do about it and what’s causing it? And anyway, so that’s the launching point for the story.

Ashley Kilgore:

So I’d love to circle back to the question at hand, or at least the one that’s been on my mind since I’ve heard the term management science announced in the podcast. How did you happen upon a 60 plus year old article from the Informs Journal Management Science and in turn, incorporate this as a key element in your podcast? Are you a low-key data scientist?

Daniel Duane:

Well, I’ll answer those questions sequentially. The second one is kind of a funny and fun one for me, so don’t let me not answer it. The “Are you a low-key data scientist?” Because I think that’s a fun one for me to think about.

Daniel Duane:

But I’ll answer the first part first about that old article. So somewhere, I can’t remember when, but somewhere along the line in my journalism, and I’m inclined to think that there’s any number of articles that I did over the years that it could have been part of, but it might have been a piece I did about, it could have been a piece I did about wildfire in the American West. It could have been a piece I did about climate change and the death of a glacier in the Sierra Nevada. I can’t remember which one it was.

Daniel Duane:

But somewhere along the line, that term wicked problem came up for me. As a journalist, I get to just call it all kinds of fun. The thing I just love about journalism is you get to call people who know what they’re talking about about things. And you get kind of good at it and disinhibited, you might say in sort of … You’re sitting there as your journalist and you’re trying to make sense of “God, what’s causing all these darn wildfires in California?” I did a big thing on this several years ago. “Why are they so, are they really bigger?” Or, “Why are they, what’s going on?”

Daniel Duane:

And you get to, “There must be somebody who knows.” And then you get kind of good at just Googling, I don’t know, “University of California, Merced, wildfire sci,” I don’t know. Just put in these terms and these names pop up. And then you just call people and you say, “Hey, I’m a journalist” So you end up with … I kind of end up talking to some pretty geeky scientists in very narrow areas and I just love that. And then I just make myself vulnerable and say, “Look, I don’t know anything, will you educate me?”

Daniel Duane:

So somewhere along the line, someone used that term for me, wicked problem. Which I hadn’t heard, but my mind kind of likes to live in complexity and ambiguity. I love complexity and ambiguity. I don’t like to move quickly towards easy answers and simple explanations for things.

Daniel Duane:

And I think that term wicked problem spoke to me. I mean, partly it’s just fun to say, but it also really, I mean, you know … But it spoke to me for that reason. It had a quality that’s a little bit like chaos theory, which is an attempt to try to characterize … It’s an attempt to characterize systems that are too complex to simplify and find ways to describe them and work with them anyway.

Daniel Duane:

So that term had been on my mind for a while. And while I was, early in my process of developing this podcast and researching the Réunion Island shark crisis, I came into it with, not just the way anyone would. “Okay, well I got to research this thing, so what’s causing all these shark attacks anyway?” And then as I looked into what was causing it, it became clear that there were a lot of hypotheses and a lot of good hypotheses. A lot of hypotheses that sounded really convincing, but that there was no data for any of them.

Daniel Duane:

And then I would be like, “Man, there must be better data somewhere. Let’s dig around, find the data.” And then I would dig around, I would discover, yeah, actually there just isn’t better data. And then the same thing happened with solutions. I would think, how complicated can it be? You got a little island, you got a bunch of sharks. I mean, you got to kill a couple sharks. You put up nets, what do you do?

Daniel Duane:

And I kind of bumped into the same phenomenon where wow, nobody really knows. There really isn’t great data. There is anecdote, there are historical tales of this and that, but man, people really don’t know. And it just brought my mind back to that idea of the wicked problem.

Daniel Duane:

But of course at that point I was just using Wikipedia, I was just sort of going on, I mean I wasn’t … So there was some point in the process where I thought, God, this idea is appealing to me so much that I think I should go back to the source. So I started trying to figure out where the term had come from, and that’s what took me to management science and took me to that original article on the topic.

Daniel Duane:

And in a way, as so often happens in journalism and all kinds of writing, when you get back to the original source, it’s often more delightful than what has been made of it over the years, right? Because that’s one of those ideas that, and I’m sure I’m bastardizing it a little bit, but it’s a classic example of an idea that emerges in a very arcane discipline, scientific discipline or scholarly discipline, and then takes on a life of its own in the popular consciousness, although I don’t know how popular it really is.

Daniel Duane:

But anyway, but going back to the source turned out to be more fun and delightful. And I found that original article more lucid and clever and playful than I had expected it to be, put it that way.

Ashley Kilgore:

So now do you identify as a low key scientist now?

Daniel Duane:

Yeah. I have to tell you, nobody has ever asked me that before, but I like it. I think I will maybe, henceforth, very low key. And the reason I’m answering that way is that one of the curious things about journalism is that if you … Journalism is, I mean, all ways of making a living are weird ones. But journalism’s a weird metier in that you, at least in magazine journalism, the sort of long form magazine journalism, the kind I’ve done, in that unless you’re somebody who really, if you really have a beat. Which I have at various times in my life. I wrote a lot about health and fitness for a long time. So then I had a beat. So then over time you start to really learn something, you start to really actually have read a lot of the books and talked to a lot of the specialists and talk to a lot, you know.

Daniel Duane:

But if you don’t have a beat and you’re sort of a generalist, which is one of the totally delightful parts of the job, you can be somebody who just is like, “Ah, I’m interested in wildfire this week. I’m interested in,” I don’t know, cyclo cross bike racing this week. There’s a kind of dilettantish quality. But you get to drop into a subject and at least for a few months really apply yourself to learning it. And I love that seriatim quality of journalism. But I also have a PhD in American literature. I know that, obviously that’s not a data driven field, at least wasn’t for me. But my point is that I know what it is to get to the bottom of a subject. I know what it is to be truly inside a scholarly discourse.

Daniel Duane:

And so when I’m talking to scholars in a given field, I’m very sensitive to the risk of oversimplifying and bastardizing their work. And I care a great deal about not … I hate it when I get it wrong. So I have always put, as a journalist, quite a lot of effort into not blowing the details of the way I represent science or the way I represent data. And over the years that has become not just a point of pride, but I have come to see that practice as something that really enriches journalism because it has, the closer you look at the data and in any given field, and the more you talk to the scientists, the researchers who are working in that field and demand …

Daniel Duane:

What I often will do, let’s say, is I’ll get the studies on something, I’ll write a first draft of an article, I’ll have talked to a bunch of experts. Right before I go to publication, I will then call the experts I really have grown to like and grown fond of and said, “Hey, can I read you a paragraph? Because I’m going to characterize some numbers here and I’m going to characterize some of your data here. And I’m a hundred percent guaranteed to have gotten something wrong. It just happens. So that’s why I’m calling you and that’s why I’m going to read this to you. I want you to tell me what’s wrong. I want you to listen carefully and any speed bump in the way I read this to you that annoys your ear, I want you to tell me. Don’t just think ‘General press, I don’t care.’ Tell me that it sounds wrong.”

Daniel Duane:

So I have learned over the years that that process greatly enriches the writing. It’s like focusing the lens of a camera. Things come into ever sharper and more crisp relief. And then we also get, like in the case of the shark crisis, or in the case of the, let’s say this wildfire piece I did a few years ago about wildfire in California, instead of resting at simple answers, we end up getting to the sort of delightful complexity that feels like the world as we actually know it.

Ashley Kilgore:

So Dan, with this Management Science article as a guide, you in your podcast lay out the shark attacks on Réunion as a wicked problem. I won’t ask you to walk us back through every point you make in that episode. I love this podcast. I encourage folks to go and listen to it. But can you briefly describe how you came to approach the Réunion shark attacks kind of in this way?

Daniel Duane:

Yeah, so it started with reading about the … Okay, so I’ve read about the [inaudible 00:31:13], “God, there’s all these attacks and all these … Well, I want to tell a story about this. Well, why are they happening?” So you start to talk to people, why are they happening? Well, quickly I started to hear hypotheses. So I’ll, this must be happening because of …

Daniel Duane:

Well actually, before we even get to that, let’s say very quickly, I started to bump into the fact that there really were voices saying, “It’s not happening.” So just from the start, okay, there’s this surf community which I align with very much because I am a surfer and I’ve written a lot about surfing and I love surfing and surfers. So I just had my natural bias that I brought to it. Well, hey, the surfers say, “Man, we used to surf these spots all the time. We were never afraid.” They’re saying, “We used to go out at night, we used to go out in the rain, nobody was ever worried. And now all of a sudden it’s terrifying. People are getting killed and we’re seeing sharks everywhere, and that’s all I need to know.”

Daniel Duane:

But I started to notice, hmm. But there are these other voices, particularly early in the crisis. This changes over time. But let’s say I’m looking at the media record from 2011, from the early days of the crisis, and there are all these voices that are not idiots. They’re like serious conservation people, conservation minded types saying, and even the director of the local Marine Reserve. So people with real scientific backgrounds saying, “There is no spike in shark attacks. There’s always been attacks on this island. There is no crisis. This is false hysteria, this is just shark hysteria.”

Daniel Duane:

And I initially was inclined to think, “Boy, this is really weird.” And I sort of started pressing further, but the further I pressed, the more I found no, these are, there are legitimate people on both sides who disagree about the fundamental question of whether there even is a crisis. And then when we get to the question of why is it, if we can even just agree, get a conversation going about, okay, let’s say that it is a crisis. Why is it happening? Why are there more attacks?

Daniel Duane:

Well, again, there was this kind of, as happens in so many things in human life these days, there was this kind of bifurcation, this kind of split down the middle into obvious camps. So the camp that had been inclined to say there is no crisis, well, they were very quickly inclined to say, “Okay, well if there are more attacks, it’s just because more of you surfers are in the water all the time. There’s nothing else going on. Surfing has gotten more common, more people in the water equals more bites.”

Daniel Duane:

The people on the other side, the people I was inclined to think of as my people, the surfers are saying, “Yeah, that’s just insane. That’s totally not what’s going on.” And then they had other explanations which started with things that sounded very plausible. For example, 1999, a neurotoxin, a naturally occurring … There’s a neurotoxin called ciguatera that occurs naturally in the flesh of, it’s a thing that bioaccumulates in the fatty tissue of large aquatic predators, and particularly like sharks. And it’s terrible if you eat the flesh.

Daniel Duane:

Okay, so 1998, I think, ’89, a bunch of people on Madagascar, four or 500 miles west, something like that, of Réunion, get very sick and a number die from eating shark meat tainted with ciguatera. The French government in the interest of public safety says, “Yikes, this is scary. All commercial sale of shark fishing is now banned on Réunion Island.”

Daniel Duane:

So this is an initial hypothesis, is we used to have a commercial shark fishery, you guys banned commercial shark fishing, all of a sudden nobody’s killing sharks anymore. So we have more sharks. Another was, well that was ’99. Hey, then in 2007 … And we’ll all recall that 2005, ‘6, ‘7, so much has happened since then. But many of us will remember that that was a period when the media cycle was filled with the first big stories about the death of the oceans, the dying fish stocks, cratering shark stocks. That’s when President George W. Bush actually created a vast marine reserve in the Pacific, during that period. Okay, French government designates the waters off the entire west coast of Réunion Island, which is really where all the good surf is, a marine reserve. So no more … It’s not quite as simple as no more fishing, but radically restricted fishing. Radically restricted.

Daniel Duane:

Okay, So these are hypotheses, right? But then I would go on Google Scholar and I’d be like, “All right, somebody must have done some science on this.” Rain Reserve, or I talked to … And it just turned out that nobody could quite get any numbers. There just were, there was all kinds of confounding problems in the data to really show there were maybe vague correlations, but there weren’t causations.

Daniel Duane:

And one of the things, my wife is also a journalist and one of the things we’ve learned that’s become kind of a watchword, I think it really comes from her, in our journalism over the years has been that if you’re really stuck, let’s say you’re writing a story and you’re feeling stuck. So the example here would be, “God sweetheart, I’m working on this thing and really having this problem because I want to be able to characterize for my listeners why these attacks are happening. And it seems like it’s this factor and that factor.” And there are a bunch of others that are kind of fun to explain, but I’ll go into them. “But yeah, kind of frustrated because the truth is I keep looking at the studies and I keep looking at them and it doesn’t add up.” And so the watch word we’ve come to in journalism where this mantra is to lean into the problem.

Daniel Duane:

You’ve hit, you’re stuck … If you’re stuck because of some problem in your storytelling, make a virtue out of that problem. In other words, use the problem, don’t try to make it go away. In other words, instead of looking at the complexity of this thing and saying, “Look, I just got to simplify this for my listener, I’m just going to say it’s probably because of these factors.” Instead of making that move, make the other move and say, “This is really confounding. There are all these factors and people are tossing them all out. And the truth is none of them quite add up.”

Daniel Duane:

So lean into it. So it was that sort of turn of thinking that was very important for me. And that was what led me to the, that was what reminded me of the idea of the wicked problem. That was when I started, I think that was probably when I went back to that article and read about it again in Management Science and thought, “Oh yeah, this is actually really good for capturing this thing.”

Ashley Kilgore:

So as I mentioned earlier, in addition to the Management Science article, and we’ve already touched on this a bit so far, throughout the podcast, there is this underlying theme of data as well as in many cases, the lack thereof. And it seemed that the data or insight that they did have, the little bit that they seem to have, didn’t always seem to be the most complete. I think, for example, there was a study from the ’70s based off insight from attacks in completely different locations. Could you share maybe an example of how incomplete data or the lack of data complicated some of these decisions being made, the decision making process that then shaped the island’s response to these attacks?

Daniel Duane:

A really good simple example is right at the beginning of the crisis. So after the very first one that did turn out to be part of this long sequence, the guy from mainland France who got his leg bit off, a couple of local guys, surfers, one of them are professional fishermen, decided to take matters in their own hands. And, “We’re going to go kill the dang shark,” right?

Daniel Duane:

So the very next day they mount up on this guy’s boat, professional fisherman’s boat, they motor over to where it happened, they drop a line with a giant frozen bonito on it. They catch a shark, they haul, they fight the shark. I mean it’s really dramatic, but they fight the shark. Fishermen on Réunion, you’re not allowed to carry firearms. In the U.S. they would just carry gun and shoot it. But then, because they can’t do that on Réunion, they have to beat it over the head to kill it. It’s gruesome, horrible.

Daniel Duane:

They bring this thing back ashore expecting to be greeted as heroes and they’re not. Why? Because this question is sort of raised of, how do you know you got the right shark? And then … Maybe I should rephrase this and put it this way. Underlying this argument about how do you know you got the right shark, was that the right thing to do, was that the wrong thing to do, is an argument about, what should we do when someone is attacked? And if you just consider the move that those guys made, the obvious thing that could occur in a very simplistic mind for anybody, “Hey, a shark just bit somebody, let’s jump in a boat and go kill a shark.”

Daniel Duane:

Well A, there’s the question, “How do you know you got the right shark?” But there’s another question which is, let’s just ask this question, which is, how many sharks are out there? Because if there’s only one and you go kill that one shark, well that’s probably going to stop attacks. But if there’s a thousand and you go out and kill one shark and they’re all just swimming around and you just killed one random shark, what did killing one random shark accomplish if there’s a thousand sharks out there?

Daniel Duane:

Or more to the point, let’s say the number of how many sharks are out there is somewhere between one and a thousand, but are those sharks territorial that … The term of art here is sedentary. So are they sedentary? Meaning do they tend to just hang out in one spot, or is the ocean just kind of an infinite fish pond, fish tank … In other words, are sharks just infinitely endlessly swimming in circles aimlessly everywhere, coming and going?

Daniel Duane:

And then you can imagine, if you just consider those two different possibilities, you could really quickly see how differently the policy response has to be based on which it is. Like, let’s say there’s 10 sharks out there and they’re totally sedentary. Sharks just take up residence at a given beach, three four of them, and that’s that. Well, if you go kill those three, four, then there’s no more sharks at that beach, but if the sharks endlessly come and go from the open ocean, what is the point of killing a shark after the killing of a human? What are you doing? It’s like this just purely performant …

Daniel Duane:

Well, in the argument on the island, people very quickly presented themselves as knowing one or the other of those positions to be true. In other words, presented themselves as well. “Sharks just come and go endlessly from the open ocean. It’s insane to kill a shark.” Or, “Come on, there’s obviously one shark that’s been hanging out right here. We’ve all seen it. It finally bit somebody and we went and killed it. What’s wrong with that?”

Daniel Duane:

But the truth is that neither side had any data to support their position. So the surfers who went out and killed the shark that night, they had a lot of anecdote. People had seen sharks. These guys themselves had seen a shark underwater. They had a kind of intuitive anecdotal understanding of what was going on, but they didn’t have any data.

Daniel Duane:

And the perfectly, people with PhDs in marine biology, who were devoted shark conservationists, who were saying, “This is insane. Sharks come and go from the open ocean. This is a completely pointless exercise.” The truth is they didn’t have any data either. They were also talking from emotion or they were talking from things they know to be. Then this will take us to another set of lacking data.

Daniel Duane:

Another thing that came up early on was, let’s say the surfers who are scared saying, “Hey, we’ve got a shark that is suddenly targeting people.” Well, “So we got to go kill this shark that is targeting people.” So then there was a counter argument that’s no more, no less legit in a way. In some ways it’s more legit. But there was a counter argument that was, “That’s insane. Sharks don’t target people. Sharks have very specific prey that they are hunting in the open ocean. They don’t hunt people. Every once in a while they make a mistake and they think that a person is a seal. So they bite that person and that’s terrible for the person. But that shark did not set out to attack a person. That shark set out to have a meal on a seal and a person inadvertently got in the way.”

Daniel Duane:

Well, that argument would hold for quite a number of shark species. The really obvious one is great white sharks. Great white sharks really are very selective predators. They really are mostly interested in marine mammals that have very thick fatty layers. So okay, so there really is quite solid data on great white sharks in this question of prey selection.

Daniel Duane:

But on Réunion, nobody even knew what the species were. So that was another completely lacking, “Are we talking about great whites? Are we talking about tiger sharks? Are we talking about bull sharks? How many tiger sharks, how many bull sharks? What kind of predatory?” Nobody had any idea what any of it was. So these social arguments erupted really because of that lack of data.

Ashley Kilgore:

So in listening to your podcast, something else that struck me was that it seemed really important to the island’s leadership and those making these decisions that these decisions were based on data. However, and I think this kind of ties it back into that wicked problem idea, is that there were instances where there was new insight or new perspectives introduced that seemed to be completely disregarded. I’m thinking in particular, there was an expert on, I believe, human response to sharks, from Australia, who was asked to support the culling of sharks despite that not being what the evidence that they had shared, supported. How did instances like this impede the decision making process on Réunion?

Daniel Duane:

Yeah, so I mean, this is almost, it seems like French policy making is a wicked problem all its own. But some of this I have to speak a little cautiously about because my understanding of French society and politics and government is really rather shallow. So maybe the best way to say this is, one of the things I heard locals say, and smart French people say, is that French culture and government loves to be seen and has a sort of emotional cultural attachment to being seen as rational and science driven. There’s some ways in which this is sort of poignant from an American perspective because it’s what we wish our culture was a little more.

Daniel Duane:

But there does seem to be kind of a French cultural … I think I’m okay in saying this. I heard this from a lot of people. There did seem to be a kind of emotional, cultural, French political attachment to being seen as making decisions based only on data, only on science. So that leads one … Let’s say you’re a person, you’re a politician, and as the guy you mentioned, he’s an American born Australian shark researcher, public policy guy. As he says at one point, “Shark attacks turn mayors into mush,” is the way he says it, because when you’re the mayor of a town where shark attacks start happening, you’re just going to end up holding the bag one way or another. There’s no good way out of this thing.

Daniel Duane:

But let’s say you’re the local mayor, you’re the local politician, these attacks start happening. Everybody’s scared and upset. You have one camp saying, “Darn it, government, mayor, get out there and kill some sharks. Make us safe. This is your fault. You didn’t make the water safe.” And then you have people on the conservation side saying, “Hey, don’t you listen to them. Don’t you go out and do something rash and stupid that’s not data based and kill a shark. Those would be crimes against ecology.”

Daniel Duane:

So you’re in a pickle as a policymaker now. So the French commitment to rationality, and to data based, data driven, science based thinking, leads the politician in that position to say, “Okay, everybody, hold on. We need to learn more. We need to commission a study.” But of course, one of the hallmarks of a wicked problem is that it’s time sensitive. It’s like climate change. We can’t just say, “Well, let’s wait 200 years until the science is really clear.” The gig is over by then. New York City’s underwater by then. That we got to deal with this thing right now and the longer we wait the worse it gets. So the shark situation was kind of like that, where the let’s go hunting data thing actually caused its own problems.

Ashley Kilgore:

Okay, Dan. So ultimately, without giving too much away, [inaudible 00:49:52] because there’s, you’ll have to check out Dan’s podcast for the full story. Was the crisis ultimately resolved?

Daniel Duane:

Well, from a data standpoint, I think I would say yes it has, because it was resolved. When I was there myself … You know, again, shark attacks are so viscerally terrifying that I found myself on the beach there having a very hard time making, I really wanted to go surfing. So I was there for a couple of weeks last September, and I … Man, I mean this is the kind of surf destination I do not get to travel to. My life does not involve a lot of getting on airplanes and flying to … It doesn’t involve any of that anymore. I did when I was a younger surfer, but with kids and a mortgage and I’m a grown up, I am not popping off to places like that.

Daniel Duane:

So here I am suddenly looking at some of the best surf I’ve ever seen. Warm water, nice French surfers encouraging me to paddle out. How do I make a decision? Well, that got me in touch in a pretty powerful way with how visceral, emotional, non-rational, non data based one’s feeling about water, getting in the water can be, one’s decision making can be, because, “Wow, God, I got kids. I really like having two legs.”

Daniel Duane:

On the other hand, and this holds to true right now, there has not been a shark attack of any kind on Réunion now in over three years. That is brushing up very closely now to, and it may have now exceeded, the longest timeframe without a shark attack that there has been since records started being kept in the ’70s.

Daniel Duane:

So does that mean that a person who paddles out can’t get bit by a shark? No, of course not. But it does mean that statistically speaking, this anomalous series of much more frequent shark attacks that happened between 2011, 2019, is over. Even if there’s an attack tomorrow, that sequence is over. If there’s an attack tomorrow and then the next day and the next day, that previous sequence is still over. We’ve just started a new sequence, I think is the way I would say it.

Ashley Kilgore:

So Dan, I want to thank you again, truly so much, for joining me. This has been an absolute blast. I’m obviously a tremendous fan of your podcast, Réunion, Shark Attacks in Paradise. So before we wrap up, why don’t you tell everyone how and where they can find it?

Daniel Duane:

Well, Réunion Shark Attacks in Paradise is available pretty much everywhere that you’d go looking for podcasts. So it’s on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and it’s even on Amazon Music. And thanks a lot for having me. I appreciate it. This is fun.

Ashley Kilgore:

Want to learn more? Visit resoundinglyhuman.com for additional information on this week’s episode and guest. The podcast is also available for download or streaming from Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, and Spotify. Wherever you listen, if you enjoy Resoundingly Human, please be sure to leave a review to help spread the word about the podcast. Until next time, I’m Ashley Kilgore and this is Resoundingly Human.