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Analyzing the Historical Rate of Catastrophes

bounded-regret.ghost.io · 4,840 words · saved by 1 readers

To communicate risks, we often turn to stories. Nuclear weapons conjure stories of mutually assured destruction, briefcases with red buttons, and nuclear winter. Climate change conjures stories of extreme weather, cities overtaken by rising sea levels, and crop failures. Pandemics require little imagination after COVID, but were previously the subject of movies like Contagion. Stories are great for conveying concrete risks (I myself recently did this for AI risks), but they’re a bad way to predict the future. That’s because most stories are far too specific to be probable. More importantly, stories tend to feature short, simple chains of causation while reality is complex and multi-causal. Instead of using stories, most competitive forecasters start their forecasts by looking at historical reference classes. This works really well, and also makes sense: history pulls us away from the biases of story-telling by grounding in events that actually occurred. While history is filtered throug

To communicate risks, we often turn to stories. Nuclear weapons conjure stories of mutually assured destruction, briefcases with red buttons, and nuclear winter. Climate change conjures stories of extreme weather, cities overtaken by rising sea levels, and crop failures. Pandemics require little imagination after COVID, but were previously the subject of movies like Contagion . Stories are great for conveying concrete risks (I myself recently did this for AI risks), but they’re a bad way to predict the future. That’s because most stories are far too specific to be probable. More importantly, s

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