= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
wedrifid comments on Is Sunk Cost Fallacy a Fallacy? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (80)
Yes, it is. Roughly speaking it is when you reason that you should persist in following a choice of actions that doesn't give the best expected payoff because you (mistakenly) treat already spent resources as if they are a future cost of abandoning the path. If your essay is about "Is the sunk cost fallacy a problem in humans?" then the answer is not so trivial.
It is not clever or deep to title things as though you are overturning a basic principle when you are not. As far as I am concerned a (connotatively) false title - and the implicit conclusion conveyed thereby - significantly undermines any potential benefit the details of the essay may provide. I strongly suggest renaming it.
And if it isn't, as I conclude (after an introduction discussing the difference between being valid in a simplified artificial model and the real world!), then it's perfectly legitimate to ask whether accusations of sunk cost fallacy - which are endemic and received wisdom - are themselves fallacious. Sheesh. I feel as if I were discussing someone's credibility and someone said 'but that's an ad hominem!'. Yes. Yes, it is.
(Notice your Wikipedia link is full of hypotheticals and description, and not real world evidence.)
People do not discuss sunk cost because it is a theorem in some mathematical model or a theoretical way possible agents might fail to maximize utility; they discuss it because they think it is real and serious. If I conclude that it isn't serious, then in what sense am I not trying to overturn a basic principle?
Finally, your criticism of the title or what overreaching you perceive in it aside, did you have any actual criticism like missing refs or anything?
But none of this changes the fact that the title is still misleading. Even if accusations of sunk cost fallacy are themselves often fallacious, this doesn't change the fact that you are arguing that the sunk cost fallacy is a mode of reasoning which doesn't often occur, rather than one that is actually valid. Claiming that it is not serious may indeed be overturning a basic principle, but it is not the basic principle the title claims you may be overturning. Sensationalize if you like, but there's no need to be unclear.
I don't know how you got that from the essay. To quote, with added emphasis:
I believe Sniffnoy, like myself, gave the author the benefit of the doubt and assumed that he was not actually trying to argue against a fundamental principle of logic and decision theory but rather claiming that the principle applies to humans far less than often assumed. If this interpretation is not valid then it would suggest that the body of the post is outright false (and logically incoherent) rather than merely non-sequitur with respect to the title and implied conclusion.
Sniffnoy claims that gwern has argued "that the sunk cost fallacy is a mode of reasoning which doesn't often occur, rather than one that is valid."
Actually, what gwern has argued is that while the sunk cost fallacy is often used as an heuristic there is little evidence that it is sound to do so in real world situations. This also seems to be what you've said, but it is not what Sniffnoy has said.
Hence my confusion.
On a side note, I don't really understand your qualms with the title, but that's less important to me.
Precisely. The wikipedia article set out to explain what the Sunk Cost Fallacy is and did it. It did not set out to answer any of the dozens of questions which would make sense as titles to your post (such as "Is the sunk cost fallacy a problem in humans?") and so real world 'evidence' wouldn't make much sense. Just like filling up the article on No True Scottsman with evidence about whether True Scottsman actually do like haggis would be rather missing the point! (The hypothetical is built right into the name for the informal fallacy!)
And with a slight tweak that is another thing that you could make your post about that wouldn't necessitate dismissing it out of hand. Please consider renaming along these lines.
Without implicitly accepting the connotations here by responding - No, your article seems to be quite thorough with making references. In particular all the dot points in the summary seem to be supported by at least one academic source.