I don’t pay much attention to the current shenanigans, but bone-headed rationalism has way too much opinions about black swan type of events. There’s never enough data to use reason in the way they think. A low expected value with high uncertainty isn’t a place to swing empiricism around like a sledgehammer.

> There are long tails in the distribution of the universe.

This is exactly the issue. There are no such “tails” on 0 data. Empiricism is a powerful tool, but it’s not universal.

I approach the tails as being open to it (a null hypothesis) until data and experimentation can reject -- within reason, as snake oil sales happen.