Twelve years ago I wrote a blog post on exactly that concept of people going after optional disproportionally large gains, where everyone else only see the survivorship bias:
"I have to wonder then whether, over many eons, we've evolved the risk appetite required to explore options - i.e. in exploration of new food sources. However, while I would argue that such risk appetite is a superior trait for populations, it may be of net negative value for any particular individual singled out of a population. Because, while a roaring success may benefit that individual as well as the population around him, say, if (s)he found a new food source and also could control its public distribution for his/her benefit, it could also turn out that the exploration fails, and the individual perishes from exposure to whatever risky environment in which he placed himself in the first place. So, extrapolated over many generations of natural selection, this successively repeated scenario would breed individuals into risky-options-seeking automatons, who don't necessarily do so on the net likelihood of their own benefit. In a large population of such risky-options-seekers, some would inevitably succeed, improving the lot of the population, but those that failed would be crossed off the natural selection list, even though the same traits were being exercised in survivors and non-survivors alike.
So when it comes to the value of risky-options on the individual basis, I would argue that the jury's still out, and that economic conservatism may be the individual's value maximizing choice after all . . ."
https://walkabout165.blogspot.com/2010/05/its-all-optional.h...
(There's context provided in the post).
I probably have some interim updated thoughts about this twelve years on, but nothing conclusive.