The Role of Evidence in Catastrophic Events

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The more uncertainty there is, the less we should worry about it. But things like this that could be truly catastrophic can actually be a reason for greater concern. Even if I only thought there was a 20% chance that the whole climate change thing was really a big deal,like most scientists claim, that would still allocate lots of resources to the problem.

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What are "shed" and "cake" projects? And how can you avoid "shed" projects? What is the "jobs to be done" framework? What is the "theory of change" framework? How can people use statistics (or statistical intuition) in everyday life? How accurate are climate change models? How much certainty do scientists have about climate change outcomes? What are some promising strategies for mitigating and reversing climate change?

Cassandra Xia (@CassandraXia) is the creator of Adventures in Cognitive Biases and co-founder of the non-profit Work on Climate. She is fascinated by how human biases affect the actions we take as a society and how to hack human psychology to get the change that we want. She is previously affiliated with the MIT Media Lab, MIT CS department, and Google AI. More of Cassandra's work can be found at cassandraxia.com and workonclimate.org.

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