“Thorin, I can’t accept your generous job offer because, honestly, I think that your company might destroy Middle Earth.”
“Bifur, I can tell that you’re one of those “the Balrog is real, evil, and near” folks who thinks that in the next few decades Mithril miners will dig deep enough to wake the Balrog causing him to rise and destroy Middle Earth. Let’s say for the sake of argument that you’re right. You must know that lots of people disagree with you. Some don’t believe in the Balrog, others think that anything that powerful will inevitably be good, and more think we are hundreds or even thousands of years away from being able to disturb any possible Balrog. These other dwarves are not going to stop mining, especially given the value of Mithril. If you’re right about the Balrog we are doomed regardless of what you do, so why not have a high paying career as a Mithril miner and enjoy yourself while you can?”
“But Thorin, if everyone thought that way we would be doomed!”
“Exactly, so make the most of what little remains of your life.”
“Thorin, what if I could somehow convince everyone that I’m right about the Balrog?”
“You can’t because, as the wise Sinclair said, ‘It is difficult to get a dwarf to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!’ But even if you could, it still wouldn’t matter. Each individual miner would correctly realize that just him alone mining Mithril is extraordinarily unlikely to be the cause of the Balrog awakening, and so he would find it in his self-interest to mine. And, knowing that others are going to continue to extract Mithril means that it really doesn’t matter if you mine because if we are close to disturbing the Balrog he will be awoken.”
“But dwarves can’t be that selfish, can they?”
“Actually, altruism could doom us as well. Given Mithril’s enormous military value many cities rightly fear that without new supplies they will be at the mercy of cities that get more of this metal, especially as it’s known that the deeper Mithril is found, the greater its powers. Leaders who care about their citizen’s safety and freedom will keep mining Mithril. If we are soon all going to die, altruistic leaders will want to make sure their people die while still free citizens of Middle Earth.”
“But couldn’t we all coordinate to stop mining? This would be in our collective interest.”
“No, dwarves would cheat rightly realizing that if just they mine a little bit more Mithril it’s highly unlikely to do anything to the Balrog, and the more you expect others to cheat, the less your cheating matters as to whether the Balrog gets us if your assumptions about the Balrog are correct.”
“OK, but won’t the rich dwarves step in and eventually stop the mining? They surely don’t want to get eaten by the Balrog.”
“Actually, they have just started an open Mithril mining initiative which will find and then freely disseminate new and improved Mithril mining technology. These dwarves earned their wealth through Mithril, they love Mithril, and while some of them can theoretically understand how Mithril mining might be bad, they can’t emotionally accept that their life’s work, the acts that have given them enormous success and status, might significantly hasten our annihilation.”
“Won’t the dwarven kings save us? After all, their primary job is to protect their realms from monsters.
“Ha! They are more likely to subsidize Mithril mining than to stop it. Their military machines need Mithril, and any king who prevented his people from getting new Mithril just to stop some hypothetical Balrog from rising would be laughed out of office. The common dwarf simply doesn’t have the expertise to evaluate the legitimacy of the Balrog claims and so rightly, from their viewpoint at least, would use the absurdity heuristic to dismiss any Balrog worries. Plus, remember that the kings compete with each other for the loyalty of dwarves and even if a few kings came to believe in the dangers posed by the Balrog they would realize that if they tried to imposed costs on their people, they would be outcompeted by fellow kings that didn’t try to restrict Mithril mining. Bifur, the best you can hope for with the kings is that they don’t do too much to accelerating Mithril mining.”
“Well, at least if I don’t do any mining it will take a bit longer for miners to awake the Balrog.”
“No Bifur, you obviously have never considered the economics of mining. You see, if you don’t take this job someone else will. Companies such as ours hire the optimal number of Mithril miners to maximize our profits and this number won’t change if you turn down our offer.”
“But it takes a long time to train a miner. If I refuse to work for you, you might have to wait a bit before hiring someone else.”
“Bifur, what job will you likely take if you don’t mine Mithril?”
“Gold mining.”
“Mining gold and Mithril require similar skills. If you get a job working for a gold mining company, this firm would hire one less dwarf than it otherwise would and this dwarf’s time will be freed up to mine Mithril. If you consider the marginal impact of your actions, you will see that working for us really doesn’t hasten the end of the world even under your Balrog assumptions.”
“OK, but I still don’t want to play any part in the destruction of the world so I refuse work for you even if this won’t do anything to delay when the Balrog destroys us.”
“Bifur, focus on the marginal consequences of your actions and don’t let your moral purity concerns cause you to make the situation worse. We’ve established that your turning down the job will do nothing to delay the Balrog. It will, however, cause you to earn a lower income. You could have donated that income to the needy, or even used it to hire a wizard to work on an admittedly long-shot, Balrog control spell. Mining Mithril is both in your self-interest and is what’s best for Middle Earth.”
This Thorin guy sounds pretty clever. Too bad he followed his own logic straight to his demise, but hey he stuck to his guns! Or pickaxe, as it were.
His argument attempting to prevent Bifur from trying to convince fellow Dwarves against mining into the Balrog's lair sounds like a variation on the baggage carousel problem (this is the first vaguely relevant link I stumbled across, don't take it as a definitive explanation)
Basically, everyone wants resource X, resulting in a given self-interested behavior whose result is to collectively lower everyone's overall success rate, but where the solution that maximizes total success directly goes against each person's self-interest. This results in an equilibrium where everyone works sub-optimally.
In this variation, the action of Thorin's operation achieving resource M moves everyone slightly closer to negative consequence B. So the goal is no longer to maximize resource collection, but to minimize it. Doing so goes against everyone's self-interest, resulting in etc. That is what Thorin is so eloquently trying to prevent Bifur from doing.
There are a couple ways Bifur can approach this.
He could do it through logical discourse: Thorin is in error when he claims
because it assumes unearthing the Balrog is a matter of incrementally filling a loading bar, where each Dwarf's contribution is miniscule. That's the naive way to imagine the situation, since you see in your mind the tunnel boring ever closer to the monster. But given that we can't know the location or depth of the Balrog, each miner's strike is actually more like a dice roll. Even if it's a large dice roll, recontexualizing the danger in this manner will surely cause some dwarves to update their risk-reward assessment of mining Mithril. A campaign of this nature will at least lower the number of dwarves willing to join Thorin's operation, although it doesn't address the "Balrog isn't real" or "Balrog isn't evil" groups.
Alternatively, he could try to normalize new moral behavior. People are willing to work against their self-interest if doing so demonstrates a socially accepted/enforced moral behavior. If he were a sly one, he could sidestep the divisive Balrog issue altogether and simply spread the notion that wearing or displaying Mithril is sinful within the context of Dwarven values. eg maybe it's too pragmatic, and not extravagant enough for a proper ostentatious Dwarven sensibility. That could shut down Thorin's whole operation without ever addressing the Balrog.
But Bifur probably sees the practical value of Mithril beyond its economic worth. As Thorin says, it's vital for the war effort - completely shutting down all Mithril mining may not be the best plan if it results in a number of Dwarf casualties similar to or greater than what he estimates a Balrog could do. So a more appetizing plan might be to combine the manipulation of logic and social norms. He could perform a professional survey of the mining systems. Based on whatever accepted arbitrary standards of divining danger the Dwarves agree to (again, assuming the location of the Balrog is literally unknowable before unearthing it due to magic), Bifur could identify mining zones of ever increasing danger within whatever tolerances he's comfortable with. He could then shop these around to various mining operations as helpful safety guidelines until he has a decent lobby behind him in order to persuade the various kings to ratify his surveys into official measuring standards. Dwarves are still free to keep mining deeper if they wish, but now with a socially accepted understanding that heading into each zone ups their risk relative to their potential reward, naturally preventing a majority of Dwarves from wanting to do so. Those who believe the Balrog doesn't exist or is far away would be confronted with Bifur's readily available surveys, putting them on the defensive. There would still be opposition from those who see the Balrog as "not evil", but the momentum behind Bifur's social movement should be enough to shout them down. This result would allow Thorin's operation to continue to supply the realm with life-saving Mithril, while at least decreasing the danger of a Balrog attack for as long as Bifur's standards are recognized.
Finally, Bifur could try to use evidenced-based research and honestly performed geological surveys, but even in the real world where locating the Balrog beforehand is technologically possible, that tends to be a weaker tactic than social manipulation. Only other experts will be able to parse them, his opponents will have emotional arguments that will give them the upper hand, and Thorin's baggage carousel logic would remain unchallenged.