I had a similar conversation with a different person a few weeks ago about an irrational view of risk/expenditures while playing the game. And that wasn’t the first time, either. They pretty much had the same reaction:
It’s absolutely amazing to me how many people fall into this line of thinking where they’d give up everything to minimize an insignificant amount of risk, even at the cost of losing out on disproportionately greater opportunities. It’s like you offer someone to wager $1 on a coin flip, and if they win they’d get $10, but they refuse the offer because they “worked very hard” for the $1 and don’t want to “lose” it.
Are people that incapable of performing basic cost/benefit analyses, and loosely estimating expected values and rates of return? That’s absolutely insane. Over the past couple of months, I’ve talked to so many people who think it’s a better idea to mine in a Venture for 1 million ISK an hour than to increase the scale of their operations to the extent that they’d make 10-20x more money even with losses taken into account simply because they’d “lose less” this way, that I lost count.