How Do You Estimate the Base Rate of Accidental Risks?

There's no track record of humanity going extinct, because if it happened even once, we wouldn't be here reasoning about it. So how do you get an estimate of the base rate of accidental risks? i think this is a fascinating questiona and it gets into the questions about the nature of probability as well. And so there's kind of interesting ways that you can geek out on that. I've thought about quite a lot but had to backpedal a litle bit for the book. It turns out that species where we don't have the problem of zero failure data also tend to last longer than other species. We're not sure what will happen next with climate change or global warming