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Desperately Trying to Fathom the Coffeepocalypse Argument

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Maybe this debate collapses into the debate around the Safe Uncertainty Fallacy, where some people think if there’s any uncertainty at all about something, you have to assume it will be totally safe and fine (no, I don’t get it either), and other people think if there’s even a 1% chance of disaster, you have to multiply out by the size of the disaster and end up very concerned (at the tails, this becomes Pascalian reasoning, but nobody has a good theory of where the tails begin). Maybe Prof. Russell’s argument implicitly assumes that everyone has a large store of knowledge about failed predictions - no heavier-than-air flying machine is possible, there is a world market for maybe five computers. The best I can say is that sometimes people on my side make similar arguments (the nuclear chain reaction one) which I don’t immediately flag as dumb, and maybe I can follow this thread to figure out why they seem tempting sometimes.

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