To put it mathematically, if I said there was a 1 in a million chance of you losing a billion dollars sometime in your life, and you agreed with me, it'd certainly be logical, if you could, to provide insurance against that eventuality for $1. In fact it'd still be mathematically sound to spend $1000. But this is for an event that you are literally 99.9999% sure will not happen. I think the big difference is in seeing reality as a neverending stream of probabilities as opposed to seeing reality as a neverending stream of certainties. The probabilistic mindset can lead you to conclusions and decisions that look peculiar to a deterministic mindset. By contrast doomsday types are those who have a deterministic mindset and have decided that the world (as we know it) is going to end and thus make that a part of their persona and worldview. Granted, they could also be of a probabilistic mindset with a different weighting but, at least in my experience, that's not usually the case.