= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
DanielLC comments on Visions and Mirages: The Sunk Cost Dilemma - 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 (68)
If you are a rational agent and encounter this, then the proper action is to keep going, since the fact that you haven't gotten any closer to your goal is just an unlikely coincidence. In real life it's much more likely that you're just committing the planning fallacy, which is why someone reading this will assume that you'll keep noticing steps you missed instead of actually being right this time.
You keep going. The situation keeps getting worse. You've now spent five times the original estimate, three times as much as the project is worth to you, and you've inflated the last set of tasks by 1000x their original estimate, which is four times as much as your now absurdly updated probability distribution says they'll take. It's still worth doing. What now?
It's sort of like asking: a coin lands on heads twenty consecutive times. Do you keep betting tails at even odds? By the way, the coin is fair.
You're giving me massive amounts of evidence that I'm falling prey to the planning fallacy, giving the impression that I'm falling prey to the planning fallacy, and trying to get me to take the appropriate action given that I'm falling prey to the planning fallacy, but you're telling me that I'm not falling prey to the planning fallacy. So which is it? Because if you're really not falling prey to it, and this really is a coincidence, then you shouldn't give up, because this time you'll be right. I know it sounds unlikely, but that's your fault for picking an unlikely premise. This is to statistics what the trolley problem is to morality.