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The point is that how "cool" something is is supposed to track the potential value there
Nope. How useful something is is supposed to track the potential value. If I were to go meta, I'd say that "cool" implies a particular kind of signaling to a specific social sub-group. There isn't much "potential value" other than the value of the signal itself.
It seems like you see me as implicitly asking "why do you guys keep making pieces instead of going on an adventure!?!?!"
Still nope. Most people don't want to go on a real adventure -- it's too risky, dangerous, uncomfortable. Most people -- by far -- prefer the predictable job of producing the pieces so that they can pay the mortgage on their suburban McMansion. In the case of academia, going for broke usually results in your being broke (and tenure-less) while a steady production of published papers gives you quite good chances of remaining in academia. Maybe not in the Ivies, but surely there is a college in South Dakota that wants you as a professor :-/
"you must produce the pieces". Really?
If you want tenure, yes. If you don't want tenure, you can do whatever you want.
then you should probably at least ask what your chance of winning the million is before settling for $500.
Sure. The answer is a shrug and if you want a verbalization, it will go along the lines of "Nobody knows".
so they are going to end up stuck as pieceworkers even if there's a way to have much much more"
There is no way for all of them to "have much much more". Whether you think the trade-off is acceptable depends, among other things, on your risk tolerance, but in any case the mode -- the most likely outcome -- is still of you losing.
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Sufficiently? X-D Clearly not.
Heh, okay. I'll try again from another angle.
To be clear I do see the whole "intrepid explorers" thing pretty much exactly how you said it. I went that way myself and I'm super glad I did. It has been fun and had large payoff for me.
At the same time though, I realize that this is not how everyone sees it. I realize that a lot of the payoffs I've gotten can be interpreted other ways or not believed. I realize that other people want other things. I realize that I am in a sense lucky to not only get anything out of it, but to even be able to afford trying. And I realize why many people wouldn't even consider the possibility.
Given that, it'd be pretty stupid to run around saying "drop what you're doing and go on an adventure!" (or anything like it) as if it weren't that from their perspective not only is "adventure" almost certainly going to lead nowhere, but they must make the pieces. As if "adventure" actually is a good idea for them - for most people, all things considered, it probably isn't.
My point is entirely on the meta level. It's not even about this topic in particular. I frequently see people rounding "this is impossible within my current models" to "this is impossible". Pointing this out is rarely a "woah!" moment for people, because people generally realize that they could be wrong and at some point you have to act on your models. If you've looked and don't see any errors it doesn't mean none exist, but knowing that errors might exist doesn't exactly tell you where to look or what to do differently.
What I think people don't realize is how important it is to think through how you're making that decision - and what actually determines whether they round something off to impossible or not. I don't think people take seriously the idea that taking negligible in-model probabilities seriously will pay off on net - since they've never seen it happen and it seems like a negligible probability thing.
And who knows, maybe it won't pay off for them. Maybe I'm an outlier here too and even if people went through the same mental motions as me it'd be a waste. Personally though, I've noticed that not always but often enough those things that feel "impossible" aren't. I find that if I look hard enough, I often find holes in my "proof of impossibility" and occasionally I'll even find a way to exploit those holes and pull it off. And I see them all the time in other people - people being wrong where they don't even track the possibility that they're wrong and therefore there is no direct path to pointing out their error because they'll round my message to something that can exist in their worldview. I have other things to say about what's going on here that makes me really doubt they're right here, but I think this is sufficient for now.
Given that, I am very hesitant to round p=epsilon down to p=0, and if the stakes are potentially high I make damn sure that my low probability is stable upon more reflection and assumption questioning. I won't always find any holes in my "proof", nor will I always succeed if I do. Nor will I always try, of course. But the motions of consciously tracking the stakes involved and value of an accurate estimate has been very worthwhile for me.
The point I'm making is in the abstract, but one that I see as applying very strongly here. Given that this is one of the examples that seems to have paid off for me, it'd take something pretty interesting (and dare I say "cool"?) to convince me that it was never worth even taking the decision seriously :)