Hm, a thought - in a world where we are only in immediate contact with less than 200 people, an event happening to someone you know about carries meaningful information about the statistical likelihood of that event. We probably developed some heuristics based on that. Now we have a global telecommunications network which means that any strange event gets broadcast everywhere - this must surely break those heuristics, artificially inflating the perceived probability of rare events. There's also "celebrities", who feel like close acquaintances to millions of people. A single rare event happening to a celebrity gets amplified hugely.