The discussion was explicitly about something that you can't mitigate, the failure of necessary components. This doesn't change by making better knots when rock-climbing (as far as I know).
You can always mitigate (duplicate safety not good enough, add triple, etc), at the end it comes down to risk/reward ratio and what's considered an acceptable risk. As a climber (and other extreme sports) I'm acutely aware of different tradeoffs I make in regards to safety/convenience/thrill and yet the couple of near death experiences I've had all involved traffic and unmitigable behaviour of other drivers.
