Julia Galef: The Sunk Costs Fallacy
President of the Center for Applied Rationality Julia Galef described the pervasive "sunk costs fallacy." Transcript -- So I want to introduce you to a concept ...
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So I want to introduce you to a concept known as the sunk cost fallacy. Imagine that you're going to the store and you're halfway there when you realize, "Oh wait, the store is actually closed today." But you figure, "Well, I've already come ten blocks. I might as well just go all the way to the store, you know, so that my ten blocks of walking won't have been wasted. Well, this is a transparently silly way to reason and I doubt that any of us would actually go all the way to a store that we knew was closed just because we'd already gone ten blocks. But this pattern of thinking is actually surprisingly common in scenarios that are a little bit less obvious than the store example. So, say you're in a career and it's becoming more and more clear ...
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So I want to introduce you to a concept known as the sunk cost fallacy. Imagine that you're going to the store and you're halfway there when you realize, "Oh wait, the store is actually closed today." But you figure, "Well, I've already come ten blocks. I might as well just go all the way to the store, you know, so that my ten blocks of walking won't have been wasted. Well, this is a transparently silly way to reason and I doubt that any of us would actually go all the way to a store that we knew was closed just because we'd already gone ten blocks. But this pattern of thinking is actually surprisingly common in scenarios that are a little bit less obvious than the store example. So, say you're in a career and it's becoming more and more clear ...
