system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How does hawking radiation cause black holes to evaporate? If one particle falls into the event horizon while the other escapes, shouldn't the black hole grow not shrink?
gpt
So this whole picture that gets repeated of "pair of particles created near the event horizon, one falls, one goes out" is not what's going on.  It's a misrepresentation of something Hawking wrote about a way to think about the calculation that leads to Hawking radiation.

So to backtrack: Yes, every time a physical particle goes past the event horizon, the black hole gets more massive.  Every time.

What does happen in Hawking radiation: There are quantum processes where the initial state is a black hole, and the final state is a slightly less massive black hole plus an outgoing particle.  This is can be thought of as a quantum tunneling process, if you're familiar with that.  The Hawking radiation process does not happen classically; it requires quantum mechanics.

What's this particle thing then?  There is a way of calculating things called *perturbation theory*.  In perturbation theory, there are objects called virtual particles.  Here's the most important thing at the moment: virtual particles are simply a calculational tool; they are not something you can observe; and there are ways of doing physics via other methods where virtual particles do not even appear.  You will never encounter a virtual particle in nature.  

Hawking (though this isn't how he did the calculation) describes a way to think of the Hawking radiation calculation in a perturbation theory language: You have an initial state that's a black hole, a final state that's a slightly smaller black hole and an outgoing particle, and the two are connected by a virtual particle.  The virtual particle and the physical outgoing particle are what gets called the "pair of particles created near the horizon," but now we see this is misleading.  In fact, only one particle is created (the outgoing one); the other one is just an artifact of this particular calculational method, and the fact that it's called a "virtual particle" even though it's not a real particle winds up regularly confusing non-specialists.