I dont think the first part of this article is quite right.
1. I doubt many people would think of 9/11 as a "1 in 50 years" event if it didn't actually happen. If you had a year-by-country level dataset of every developed country post ww2, you'd have thousands of observations but none would have as many fatalies from terrorism as the US in 2001.
2. If a genuinely super rare event occurs (like one in thousands), its often more reasonable to think that theres been some fundamental shift in the world that you failed to recognize, rather than that you just got super lucky or unlucky to have lived through it.
1. I doubt many people would think of 9/11 as a "1 in 50 years" event if it didn't actually happen. If you had a year-by-country level dataset of every developed country post ww2, you'd have thousands of observations but none would have as many fatalies from terrorism as the US in 2001.
2. If a genuinely super rare event occurs (like one in thousands), its often more reasonable to think that theres been some fundamental shift in the world that you failed to recognize, rather than that you just got super lucky or unlucky to have lived through it.