This is called the Turkey fallacy: the turkey was feed by humans for 1000 days, and after each feed event he updated his belief that humans care for him until it's now almost a statistical certainty.
Is this the reverse of the Gambler's Fallacy? Instead of "The numbers haven't hit in a while, therefore they're going to hit soon." it's "The numbers haven't hit yet, therefore they're never gonna hit."
Also known as complacency. Working in a woodshop, one of the things you are most vulnerable to is failing to respect the danger you're in. This is why many experienced woodworkers have been injured by e.g. a table saw - you stop being as careful after such long exposure.
A related thing is normalization of deviance. You start removing safety because you see nothing bad happened before, until you are at a point where almost no safety rules are respected anymore. You can see this a lot in construction videos.
Oh man, that's terrible. I can certainly understand how someone without a checklist that is verified by two people can do that, especially if you have a backpack on to mask the fact that the parachute is missing.
Many times if I wear a tight jacket in the car, I forget to put my seat belt on, because I unconsciously mistake the pressure of the jacket for the seatbelt's, even though putting on a seat belt is usually the first thing I do.
Wow, that's terrifying and a good cautionary tale.
Also, when I read
> I’m hoping you can you forgive me as a minister of religion for likening this story to a spiritual cautionary tale. Yes, we do need to live each day as if it might be our last.
I thought, "Hmm, sounds adventist", and sure enough :-)
Probably not. But they aren't affected by the previous N climbs, at least as described by GP post. They are considering a fixed odds event, and the probability of (bad thing happens) over a sample path through time. That's not the turkey fallacy.
In other words , the difference between the turkey and the climber is the climber knows the odds (at least nominally) , and it’s important .