On the other extreme, we could imagine repeatedly flipping a coin with only heads on it, or a coin with only tails on it, but we don’t know which, but we think it’s probably the one only with heads. Of course, this goes too far, since only one coin flip outcome is enough to find out what coin we were flipping. Instead, we could imagine two coins, one with only heads (or extremely biased towards heads), and the other a fair coin, and we lose if we get tails. The more heads we get, the more confident we should be that we have the heads-only coin.
To translate this into risks, we don’t know what kind of world we live in and how vulnerable it is to a given risk, and the probability that the world is vulnerable to the given risk at all an upper bound for the probability of catastrophe. As you suggest, the more time goes on without catastrophe, the more confident we should be that we aren’t so vulnerable.
This is an important point. Thanks for sharing.
On the other extreme, we could imagine repeatedly flipping a coin with only heads on it, or a coin with only tails on it, but we don’t know which, but we think it’s probably the one only with heads. Of course, this goes too far, since only one coin flip outcome is enough to find out what coin we were flipping. Instead, we could imagine two coins, one with only heads (or extremely biased towards heads), and the other a fair coin, and we lose if we get tails. The more heads we get, the more confident we should be that we have the heads-only coin.
To translate this into risks, we don’t know what kind of world we live in and how vulnerable it is to a given risk, and the probability that the world is vulnerable to the given risk at all an upper bound for the probability of catastrophe. As you suggest, the more time goes on without catastrophe, the more confident we should be that we aren’t so vulnerable.
Nice explanation, thanks