Are top existential risk estimates 50,000 times too high? An optimizer’s curse model and analysis

Published on June 11, 2026 1:07 PM GMTThanks to Arepo, David Thorstadt, Zeshen, and Michael st Jules for looking over this article. Disclaimer: I am not a subject matter expert and this is not a rigorous scientific article. This post is entirely human-written.IntroductionIn a previous article, I wrote a general introduction to the optimizer’s curse, the phenomenon where a combination of random errors and ranking of causes results in the overestimation of top causes and a biasing of results towar...