How this is built

The moat is trust.

Every entry is schema-validated, citation-backed, and archived.

522 risks

201 decisions

3 languages

Likelier compares what people think is dangerous with the estimated lifetime probability, using authoritative sources and a transparent methodology. The goal is to give readers — and the LLMs they ask — a better starting point than gut feelings and news cycles.

Content is available in 3 languages.

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Why I built this

Likelier started with my own kids. They’re young, and I noticed myself organizing too much of family life around unlikely harms, until I wanted something to push back with. Not advice, not reassurance: just a sourced estimate of how likely a feared thing actually is, set beside risks I already understood.

So I began using AI assistants, then agents, to find sources, check definitions, and put every fear on one scale. That comparison is the whole site.

The premise is simple: vivid risks are easy to overfeel, especially in feeds built for salience. Likelier is a counterweight, not a neutral map of the world. It comes from one person’s vantage: Polish, big-city, middle-class, IT, with two young kids. So the catalogue likely overrepresents parenting, urban, Western, and tech-adjacent fears, and underrepresents risks outside that life. Every entry is sourced and scoped; the collection is curated, so judge it through that lens.

What we publish

Native probability

A native-unit probability as the source reports it ("1 in 11,000,000 per flight").

Normalized lifetime risk

A normalized lifetime risk for a US adult so different topics are actually comparable.

Full claim ledger

A full claim ledger: source type, verbatim excerpt, calculation notes, uncertainty, archive snapshot.

Perceived-risk side

A perceived-risk side tied to a cited survey, or explicitly labeled as editorial intuition.

Open data

A suggestions page, corrections log, and the raw data as JSON.

What we don’t publish

When the evidence is weak, contradictory, or can’t be normalized to a comparable baseline, we say so explicitly using a no reliable estimate state rather than inventing a number.

Trust

Content governance is the point of the site. See methodology for the normalization assumptions and source-type policy, and suggest for the public log of fixes.

Who makes this

I write and maintain Likelier. Claude agents handle sourcing and verification; I spot-check every entry before it’s published.

Data freshness

Every entry tracks its last review date. The newest are within the last 30 days; the oldest are flagged for re-review when sources update.

State of the catalogue

These figures describe the 522 risks in the catalogue: a deliberately varied but non-random set of the things people fear, not the risks an average person faces. Each one is reported with its denominator.

46% below a 1-in-100 lifetime chance of 186 US-adult-lifetime entries

28% 1 in 10 or likelier of 186 US-adult-lifetime entries

9 orders of magnitude from 1 in 1 to 1 in 1,000,000,000

79 carry no reliable number evidence too weak to publish one

Median catalogued risk: about 1 in 63. The collection is curated, so read every figure as a property of the catalogue, not a measurement of the world.

Quality review

Each entry is scored on eight dimensions before publication. Here is what each dimension checks and why it matters.

Risk entries

Source grounding: Every URL we cite must resolve, and every quoted excerpt must appear verbatim in the source. If a source goes dead between publication and re-review, we use the archived snapshot captured at publication time. A score of 1 here is an automatic reject.
Source authority: At least two independent sources per claim, and at least one must be a peer-reviewed paper, primary study, government report, or reputable reference work. News coverage and encyclopedia summaries on their own do not clear the bar.
Arithmetic: The chain from the raw number a source reports to the "1 in N" we publish to a lifetime probability for a US adult is shown step by step and re-checked independently. A wrong denominator or a missing exposure window fails this check. A score of 1 here is an automatic reject.
Uncertainty: The low and high band we publish must be defensible from the literature and must contain the point estimate. A suspiciously tight band on weak data is treated as a failure to calibrate, not a strength.
Scope: If the entry is not a US-adult lifetime probability — because it is activity-specific, global, or restricted to a sub-population — the scope field has to declare it and the underlying calculation has to match. Mislabeling an activity-specific rate as a population baseline is the textbook failure. A score of 1 here is an automatic reject.
Prose: Dry, skeptical, no "you should…", no false reassurance, follows the in-house style guide. Polished copy that sneaks advice back in gets returned for a rewrite.
Perception honesty: When we publish a perceived-risk number, we say whether it comes from a cited survey or from editorial intuition. We do not invent a survey to fill a gap.
Caveat completeness: Known limitations — population heterogeneity, surveillance gaps, the era the underlying data is from — are stated in the body of the entry, not buried in a footnote.

Threshold: every dimension scores at least 3, the average is at least 4.0 / 5, and any score of 1 on Source grounding, Arithmetic, or Scope is an automatic reject regardless of the average.

First audit data will be published with the next review batch.

Decision pairs

Source verification: Every URL we cite must resolve and every quoted excerpt must appear verbatim in the source. A score of 1 here is an automatic reject.
Source authority & independence: Each side of the decision — the action and the inaction — needs at least one authoritative source, and the two sources must be truly independent rather than the same study reframed two different ways.
Regret-rate accuracy: The regret percentage must come from a study that directly measures regret for this decision. A satisfaction proxy, a related-but-different question, or a regret rate borrowed from a sibling decision all fail this check. This is the dimension that fails most often in review. A score of 1 here is an automatic reject.
Source comparability: Both sides should use comparable methodology — same time horizon, same sample frame, same regret instrument — or we say so explicitly. A score of 1 here is an automatic reject.
Gilovich pattern: Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec (1995) found that people regret actions more in the short term but inactions more over a lifetime. We classify each decision against that pattern; when our data inverts it, we publish the inversion and flag it rather than smoothing the framing.
Prose quality: Dry, skeptical, no "you should…", no false reassurance, follows the in-house style guide.
Caveat completeness: Known limitations — sample quality, generalizability, population assumptions — are stated in the body of the entry, not buried in a footnote.
Sample quality: Sample size and representativeness must be appropriate for a regret claim about US adults. Small, skewed, or non-US samples are called out in the body.

Threshold: every dimension scores at least 3, the average is at least 4.0 / 5, and any score of 1 on Source grounding, Regret-rate accuracy, or Source comparability is an automatic reject regardless of the average.

First audit data will be published with the next review batch.

Methodology Suggest

Support

Likelier is free and ad-free. If it’s useful to you, consider buying us a coffee — it funds the research and the archiving that keeps citations durable.

If this helped you think more clearly about risk, consider supporting the project so we can keep the data trustworthy and ad-free.