I suppose there’s a 2×2 here: sane versus crazy, alive versus dead.
The possibility of sane and alive is the hope that drives rationalists. The possibility of crazy and alive is what fuels the stack-lucky, and increasingly, the latter is a better bet.

But neither bet is a certainty. The reality of sane and dead is what brings down the rationalists. The reality of crazy and dead is what brings down the weird.

Crazy and dead is apparently the ground state of human civilization. When things break crazy, the lunatics end up running the asylum.

A lunatic, by my definition, is a stupid person in Cipolla’s sense: a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

Yep, these people now run the world.