[SossMan]

wow...ok, let me take these one at a time...

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What we are saying here is I can increase my chip +EV by getting more callers and +EV equals success at this stage of the tournament.

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That is exactly what I'm saying. Why shouldn't your stack be in very close proportion to how well you finish in the tourney? Do you feel that your tournament equity would be twice as much with twice the amount of chips? While each individual chip is worth less to you as you accumulate more chips, having a big stack in relation to your opponents gives you much more room for errors/bad beats/blind stealing/picking on small stacks down the road. That is why it is pretty common knowledge that chipEV and cashEV don't greatly diverge until you get to within a few spots of and into the money. Do a search on here, there has been much written about it by people much more eloquent than I.

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What I don’t see is although my +EV goes up so does my chance of being knocked out. There is clearly a trade off here between the two. I find it difficult to accept that you risk going out most of the time for a big +EV.

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Well, then, I'm not sure you understand EV. It's pretty hard to find a "big +EV" situation that you wouldn't take because not doing so would presumably allow you to take advantage of "bigger +EV" down the road. These big +EV situations simply don't come along that often, and it is almost always wrong to pass on them.

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Surely even in a cash game you don’t want a large number of callers. If we did we would never raise with a strong starting hand.

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Ok...this one is blatently wrong. In a cash game you would ALWAYS take a +EV situation (unless you are playing with money you can't afford to lose). You would always want people with worse hands to call your raise...this is how we make money in poker.
But the reason we raise is to charge the people with weaker hands and give them improper odds to call your bet. It is a common mistake to think that we raise to "thin the field". If they go away...rats!, they made a proper decision...if they call w/ out the proper odds, whoo hoo, we win (even when we lose). Not raising with big hands is wrong not because you fail to thin the field and thus lose more often, but you didn't make your opponent make a mistake. (well, not a bad mistake anyway)