Risk is systemically underrated by cognitive bias.

Our cognitive biases also tend towards direct-causal near-term events, thereby marginalising tangential, second-order, or cumulative effects that may instead constitute an existential risk. From this view, pandemics are considered as diseases that directly kill human beings, rather than those which might trigger the demise of humanity in more circuitous fashion (for example, by a disease that targets and devastates staple crops in “pandemic” proportions).39 Thus, while existential risk research leans towards the spectacular one-hit knock-out events, such as asteroid strikes and all-out nuclear war, such direct existential risks can only be but a subset when it comes to threats for humanity as a whole. To counteract this type of bias, we would need to develop appropriate models and approaches to monitoring existential risks that focus on existential outcomes (as opposed to existential hazards) that flow from other events or emerge through the interaction lower level activity that might, taken together, constitute an existential risk.

Finally, our cognitive biases struggle to cope with historically recurring, but statistically rare events.40 In this vein, Wiener argues that public assessments of risks may neglect extremely rare catastrophic risks, due to factors such as psychological unavailability, mass numbing, and under-deterrence; critically, he argues that in such contexts, foresight and anticipation are critical, and that the inability to learn from experience (‘adaptive learning’) offers an even stronger case for precaution than mere uncertainty as such.41 This is directly pertinent to pandemics, given the ample historical record of plagues that repeatedly killed off significant proportions of the human population. Given accessible records of past catastrophe, our collective susceptibility to such known hazards is especially incongruous from an existential risks perspective: it is one thing to be caught out by a wholly novel threat, and quite another to be toppled by something that we knew about all along. Thus, the failure to have a global asteroid defence programme in place is congruent with our failure to prepare for Covid-19: these are both statistically rare events at any given time, despite a clear record of such events taking place in the past with cataclysmic effect.