When your catalogue of mechanisms is certainly incomplete, stop summing mechanisms and bound the total from an outcome record instead. Ord makes the move explicitly for natural risk: cataloguing known threats cannot capture even a small part of the true landscape, however completely each threat is understood, so he turns to the fossil record and estimates total extinction risk from how long species like us actually survived. The method matters more than the application. Our own reasoning about coordination failure is a catalogue of mechanisms with no outcome record behind it, which means we have no upper bound and no way to discover the mechanisms we have not thought of.

Evidence 1 passage

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The likely incompleteness of our knowledge is a major problem for any attempt to understand the scale of natural risk by cataloguing known threats. Even if we studied all the natural threats listed in this chapter so completely that we understood their every detail, we could not be sure that we were capturing even a small part of the true risk landscape. Luckily, there is a way out, a way of directly estimating the total natural risk. We achieve this not by considering the details of asteroid craters or collap

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