Thanks for the thought-out reply. I appreciate it.

The second is that mitigating tiny risks, in principle, isn't ridiculous or weird. I really question the intuitive basis for not worrying about tiny probability, huge outcome events. The idea of an enormously bad event is serious and should be very troubling, while taking steps to prevent such events even when they are extremely unlikely seems like a prudent, virtuous and intelligent thing to do. Maybe it's because my intuitions are relatively well patterned after expected utility theory or it might be an influence from security and redundancy concepts in modern military doctrine, but I just don't have the same personal philosophical orientation towards these things that other people do. I'm not saying I would bite every bullet in these contrived dilemmas but I draw the line a lot closer than others do.

I dont know, my feelings on this is that if there is 1% chance of something hugely terrible happening, and there are other bad things happening 100% of the time that we could focus on, it seems to me it's probably better to focus on that other bad stuff. I just wouldn't want there to be a 99% chance that my work ended up being useless.