Interesting to see this incorrect line of reasoning about risk laid out so explicitly.
If you're around people who do extreme sports with serous risk, you'll know many people who have this attitude and you'll also know many people who incurred life-altering injuries or died because of this attitude.
A friend of mine who's reasonable and has a higher risk tolerance than me used to paddle with a group of whitewater kayakers who were doing the hardest stuff. 4 out of 7 of them died. She says
the reason she's still alive and so many of her compatriots are not is how she thinks about risk.
People would say things like "there's a 99% chance this will be fine", where "not fine" is fatal and they would then run something that had a 99% chance of working out. She wouldn't do that because, of course, if you regularly take a 1% chance of death, you're going to end up dead unless you're extremely lucky.
Another one is that she would never run something she hadn't observed before, whereas
Dan Luu
Vitor Baptista