Rare events are handled poorly by intuition. They get overweighted when they are vivid, recent, or emotionally charged—and underweighted when they are abstract.
Probability weighting is uneven. Moving from impossibility to possibility feels huge; moving from 90% to 100% also feels huge. The middle is treated with less sensitivity.
This makes people chase long shots and fear unlikely catastrophes. It also makes them neglect slow, common risks that lack drama.
The fast system responds to stories, not to distribution tails. The slow system can reason in expected value, but it has to fight imagination.
If you want better decisions under uncertainty, treat rare events with explicit numbers and clear reference classes. Otherwise, the mind will outsource probability to emotion.