Does disaster frequency follow power laws? It’s complicated by titotal

Dis­claimer: This is a huge topic, and I’m barely scratch­ing the sur­face here. I’m not an ex­pert on these sub­jects, and am mostly try­ing to sum­marise the work of ex­perts in an ac­cessible way. All writ­ing is my own. In­tro­duc­tion:One of my chief com­plaints about the field of ex­is­ten­tial risk pre­ven­tion is that it of­ten re­lies on es­ti­mates that are not well-grounded in em­piri­cal ev­i­dence. But I want to be clear that some em­piri­cal data on threats to hu­man­ity does ex­is...