Episode Details

This is a link post.

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 exist and can be analysed in statistically meaningful ways. Obviously we don’t have any data on the incidence of global human extinction, but we do have data for other measures of danger, like earthquake magnitude, tornado speed, deaths from terrorism, and many others.

Furthermore, in many cases these threats appear to closely follow statistical patterns. The most commonly attributed statistical pattern is something called a power law distribution. If you’ve heard of the “80-20” rule, or the Pareto distribution, these are referring to power laws. The list of phenomenon which have been attributed to power law behaviour is frankly ridiculous. Here is a non-exhaustive list of topics we will mention in this post:

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First published:
May 26th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ovkHXerR8z2Qjyf9o/does-disaster-frequency-follow-power-laws-it-s-complicated

Linkpost URL:
https://titotal.substack.com/p/does-disaster-frequency-follow-power

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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