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SilasBarta comments on Privileging the Hypothesis - Less Wrong
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Reminiscent of the guy who was asked what were the odds he would win the lottery, and replied, "Fifty-fifty, either I win or I don't." The corresponding heuristic-and-bias is I think known as "packing and unpacking" or something along those lines.
I remember the Daily Show had a funny example of this in action. They were interviewing people about the possibility of the Large Hadron Collider destroying the earth, and they talked to a physicist and a crazy survivalist. The former said it was impossible for the LHC to destroy the earth, while the latter used basically that argument: "There are two possibilities: it can destroy us, or not. So, that's about a 50/50 chance."
Then later the interviewer followed the survivalist to his bunker and asked him: if everyone died but them, don't they have an obligation to mate to repopulate the earth? (They were both men.) The survivalist said, "Um, no, because that doesn't work. It's impossible." And then the interviewer came back with, "well, there's two possibilities: we'll produce a baby, or we won't, so that's 50/50 -- pretty good odds."
I'm sure someone would love to dig up the clip...
Sure! Didn't take more than three years for someone to do that, either!
Though apparently your mind edited out how the interviewee's "there's a 0% chance it [them reproducing] will work" makes a great parallel with how John Ellis, who's otherwise amazing in this video, earlier explains that "there is 0% chance", "zero", of the LHC destroying the world[*]. Sigh.
(The clip is great from start to finish, but IMHO the funniest part is what John Oliver says in answer to "This place is perfectly safe" towards the end of the video. I was going to say that the only people it could be said to make fun of are annoying nitpickers, but on reflection, it's actually feels like a really great dig at people who make terrible arguments and want you to take them seriously, even though they really should realize the flaw themselves.)
[*] Technically, the video only suggests that it is world-destroying that Ellis claims to have "0% chance", and this is the Daily Show, but I think we can safely assume that ths is not selective editing to make him look like a bad Bayesian.