I just had an epiphany

People will generally feed a lane because that's how the matchup plays out. Not the 1v1 matchup. The team v team matchup. I think the notion that feeding = bad player is horrifically misguided because it vastly underestimates the base rate of feeding with given starting conditions.

I think some people already have a notion of this. You don't feed Kat, Leblanc, or Kassadin. They snowball hard, so even letting them get a bit ahead can really screw you up. The only problem is that the very things that make them snowball hard are what make them be able to snowball in the first place. Sure, it sucks that Kat go 3 kills. It really does. But are you seriously telling me you don't expect Kat to get 3 kills somehow?

If she didn't get 3 kills to snowball, that's evidence for problems on HER end, not that you played properly.

I think there's two things at work here: the first one is people's tendency to not account for the base rate when judging probabilities, and that leads to horrible over/under estimation when certain things are skewed. The second one is the judgment based on feeling. Yes, it fucking sucks that KAt is snowballing. That does not necessarily mean your teammate (or you) played poorly.

Let's assume both you and your opponent are playing equally well. The enemy is a snowballer. What is the expected outcome? If your answer is, "Ori plays safe and doesn't feed," you have basically said that the expected outcome in Pro play of snowballing champions is that they don't snowball early game. And that's ludicrous. Sure, they might not snowball as hard as pub matches, but you should expect for them to snowball. It's what they do. They way you don't let them snowball is by outplaying them. You know, by being better at the game than them.