You paid a karma toll to comment on one of my most unpopular posts yet
My understanding is that the karma toll is charged only when responding to downvoted posts within a thread, not when responding to the OP.
to... move the goalposts from "You don't know what you're talking about" to "The only correct definition of what you're talking about is the populist one"?
I didn't say that the only correct definition is the most popular one; you are shading my position to make it more vulnerable to attack. My position is merely that if, as you yourself said, "everybody" uses a different definition, then that is the definition. You said "everybody is silently ignoring what the fallacy actually refers to". But what a term "refers to" is, by definition, what people mean when they say it. The literal meaning (and I don't take kindly to people engaging in wild hyperbole and then accusing me of being hyperliteral when I take them at their word, in case you're thinking of trying that gambit) of your post is that in the entire world, you are the only person who knows the "true meaning" of the phrase. That's absurd. At the very least, your use is nonstandard, and you should acknowledge that.
Now, as to "moving the goalposts", the thing that I suspected you of not knowing what you were talking about was knowing the standard meaning of the phrase "sunk cost fallacy", so the goalposts are pretty much where they were in the beginning, with the only difference being that I have gone from strongly suspecting that you don't know what you're talking about to being pretty much certain.
Well, I guess we'd better redefine evolution to mean "Spontaneous order arising out of chaos", because apparently that's how we're doing things now.
I don't know of any mainstream references defining evolution that way. If you see a parallel between these two cases, you should explain what it is.
You're not even getting the -populist- definition of the fallacy right.
Ideally, if you are going to make claims, you would actually explain what basis you see for those claims.
Your version, as-written, implies that the cost for a movie ticket to a movie I later decide I don't want to see is -negative- the cost of that ticket. See, I paid $5, and I'm not paying anything else later, so 0 - 5 = -5, a negative cost is a positive inlay, which means: Yay, free money?
Presumably, your line of thought is that what you just presented is absurd, and therefore it must be wrong. I have two issues with that. The first is that you didn't actually present what your thinking was. That shows a lack of rigorous thought, as you failed to make explicit what your argument is. This leaves me with both articulating your argument and mine, which is rather rude. The second problem is that your syllogism "This is absurd, therefore it is false" is severely flawed. It's called the Sunk Cost Fallacy. The fact that it is illogical doesn't disqualify it from being a fallacy; being illogical is what makes it a fallacy.
Typical thinking is, indeed, that if one has a ticket for X that is priced at $5, then doing X is worth $5. For the typical mind, failing to do X would mean immediately realizing a $5 loss, while doing X would avoid realizing that loss (at least, not immediately). Therefore, when contemplating X, the $5 is considered as being positive, with respect to not doing X (that is, doing X is valued higher than not doing X, and the sunk cost is the cause of the differential).
Why didn't I bring that up before? Because I'm not here to score points in an argument.
And if you were here to score points, you would think that "You just described X as being a fallacy, and yet X doesn't make sense. Hah! Got you there!" would be a good way of doing so? I am quite befuddled.
Why do I bring it up now? Because I'm a firm believer in tit-for-tat - and you -do- seem to be here to score points in an argument
I sincerely believe that you are using the phrase "sunk cost fallacy" that is contrary to the standard usage, and that your usage impedes communication. I attempted to inform you of my concerns, and you responded by accusing me of simply trying "score points". I do not think that I have been particularly rude, and absent prioritizing your feelings over clear communication, I don't see how I could avoid you accusing me of playing "games of trivial social dominance".
"Once I've called that, usually -my- turn is to reiterate that it's a game of social dominance, and that this entire thing is what monkeys do"
Perceiving an assertion of error as being a dominance display is indeed something that the primate brain engages in. Such discussions cannot help but activate our social brains, but I don't think that means that we should avoid ever expressing disagreement.
We could, of course, skip -all- of that, straight to: What exactly do you actually want out of this conversation? To impart knowledge? To receive knowledge? Or do you merely seek dominance?
My immediate motive is to impart knowledge. I suppose if one follows the causal chain down, it's quite possible that humans' desire to impart knowledge stems from our evolution as social beings, but that strikes me as overly reductionist.
My understanding is that the karma toll is charged only when responding to downvoted posts within a thread, not when responding to the OP.
You could be correct there.
...I didn't say that the only correct definition is the most popular one; you are shading my position to make it more vulnerable to attack. My position is merely that if, as you yourself said, "everybody" uses a different definition, then that is the definition. You said "everybody is silently ignoring what the fallacy actually refers to". But what a term "refers to&q
Summary
How should a rational agent handle the Sunk Cost Dilemma?
Introduction
You have a goal, and set out to achieve it. Step by step, iteration by iteration, you make steady progress towards completion - but never actually get any closer. You're deliberately not engaging in the sunk cost fallacy - at no point does the perceived cost of completion get higher. But at each step, you discover another step you didn't originally anticipate, and had no priors for anticipating.
You're rational. You know you shouldn't count sunk costs in the total cost of the project. But you're now into twice as much effort as you would have originally invested, and have done everything you originally thought you'd need to do, but have just as much work ahead of you as when you started.
Worse, each additional step is novel; the additional five steps you discovered after completing step 6 didn't add anything to predict the additional twelve steps you added after completing step 19. And after step 35, when you discovered another step, you updated your priors with your incorrect original estimate - and the project is still worth completing. Over and over. All you can conclude is that your original priors were unreliable. Each update to your priors, however, doesn't change the fact that the remaining cost is always worth paying to complete the project.
You are starting to feel like you are caught in a penny auction for your time.
When do you give up your original goal as a mirage? At what point do you give up entirely?
Solutions
The trivial option is to just keep going. Sometimes this is the only viable strategy; if your goal is mandatory, and there are no alternative solutions to consider. There's no guarantee you'll finish in any finite amount of time, however.
One option is to precommit; set a specific level of effort you're willing to engage in before stopping progress, and possibly starting over from scratch if relevant. When bugfixing someone else's code on a deadline, my personal policy is to set aside enough time at the end of the deadline to write the code from scratch and debug that (the code I write is not nearly as buggy as that which I'm usually working on). Commitment of this sort can work in situations in which there are alternative solutions or when the goal is disposable.
Another option is to discount sunk costs, but include them; updating your priors is one way of doing this, but isn't guaranteed to successfully navigate you through the dilemma.
Unfortunately, there isn't a general solution. If there were, IT would be a very different industry.
Summary
The Sunk Cost Fallacy is best described as a frequently-faulty heuristic. There are game-theoretic ways of extracting value from those who follow a strict policy of avoiding engaging in the Sunk Cost Fallacy which happen all the time in IT - frequent requirement changes to fixed-cost projects are a good example (which can go both ways, actually, depending on how the contract and requirements are structured). It is best to always have an exit policy prepared.
Related Less Wrong Post Links
http://lesswrong.com/lw/at/sunk_cost_fallacy/ - A description of the Sunk Cost Fallacy
http://lesswrong.com/lw/9si/is_sunk_cost_fallacy_a_fallacy/ - Arguments that the Sunk Cost Fallacy may be misrepresented
http://lesswrong.com/lw/9jy/sunk_costs_fallacy_fallacy/ - The Sunk Cost Fallacy can be easily used to rationalize giving up
ETA: Post Mortem
Since somebody has figured out the game now, an explanation: Everybody who spent time writing a comment insisting you -could- get the calculations correct, and the imaginary calculations were simply incorrect? I mugged you. The problem is in doing the calculations -instead of- trying to figure out what was actually going on. You forgot there was another agent in the system with different objectives from your own. Here, I mugged you for a few seconds or maybe minutes of your time; in real life, that would be hours, weeks, months, or your money, as you keep assuming that it's your own mistake.
Maybe it is a buggy open-source library that has a bug-free proprietary version you pay for - get you in the door, then charge you money when it's more expensive to back out than to continue. Maybe it's somebody who silently and continually moves work to your side of the fence on a collaborative project, when it's more expensive to back out than to continue. Not counting all your costs opens you up to exploitative behaviors which add costs at the back-end.
In this case I was able to mug you in part because you didn't like the hypothetical, and fought it. Fighting the hypothetical will always reveal something about yourself - in this case, fighting the hypothetical revealed that you were exploitable.
In real life I'd be able to mug you because you'd assume someone had fallen prone to the Planning Fallacy, as you assumed must have happened in the hypothetical. In the case of the hypothetical, an evil god - me - was deliberately manipulating events so that the project would never be completed (Notice what role the -author- of that hypothetical played in that hypothetical, and what role -you- played?). In real life, you don't need evil gods - just other people who see you as an exploitable resource, and will keep mugging you until you catch on to what they're doing.