It's a interesting paper with ties to lots of classical problems in clinical decision making, risk analysis, and statistical modeling. I've not seen it framed i

It's a interesting paper with ties to lots of classical problems in clinical decision making, risk analysis, and statistical modeling. I've not seen it framed in quite this way. I'm not sure "unpredictable" is quite the right term but maybe? The problem is when you have very high impact events that are very low probability, the probability assigned to the event in the individual case (a factory explosion) is essentially zero, even though in aggregate at the group level you know these occur. Moreover, these very low-base rate probabilities are difficult to estimate accurately for various reasons, so the probability in a given case might actually be 10^-4 or 10^-100. So you end up deciding something probably won't happen, but at a societal level it will, because the probabilities are underestimated and there's lots of cases like this. I think they'd say variance is relevant, but at the level of actual model uncertainty attached to an estimated probability or something? The stats is a little underdeveloped, but the papers I've seen often are, except in bayesian low-base rate modeling papers, which tend to ignore the individual versus group prediction, model uncertainty, and utility combination.