Analyzing the Historical Rate of Catastrophes

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 predi...