I assert that the sunken cost "fallacy" is actually a quite sophisticated mechanism of human reasoning. People who take into account sunken costs in everyday decisions will make better decisions on average.

My argument relies on the proposition that a person's estimate of his own utility function is highly noisy. In other words, you don't really know if going to the movie will make you happy or not, until you actually do it.

So if you're in this movie-going situation, then you have at least two pieces of data. Your current self has produced an estimate that says the utility of going to the movie is negative. But your former self produced an estimate that says the utility is substantially positive - enough so that he was willing to fork over $10. So maybe you average out the estimates: if you currently value the movie at -$5, then the average value is still positive and you should go. The real question is how confident you are in your current estimate, and whether that confidence is justified by real new information.

Ordering a thousand fanatic janitors to program an optimizing compiler will bear no fruit.

Stop equating intelligence with LW-rationality.

Post in this thread if you live in Orange County

I chose to believe in the existence of God - deliberately and consciously. This decision, however, has absolutely zero effect on the actual existence of God.

If you know your belief isn't correlated to reality, how can you still believe it?

To be fair, he didn't say that the actual existence of God has absolutely zero effect on his decision to believe in the existence of God.

His acknowledgement that the map has no effect on the territory is actually a step in the right direction, even though he has many more steps to go.

A banal one is that misinforming takes effort and not informing saves effort.

That's an important distinction. In both scenarios, the Carpenter suffers the same disutility, but the utility for Walrus is higher for "secret" than for "lies" if his utility function values saving effort. Perhaps that's the reason we don't feel morally obligated to walk the streets all day yelling correct information at people even though many of them are uninformed.

However, this rationalization breaks down in a scenario where it takes more effort to keep a secret than to share it (such as an interrogation), although I assume our intuitions regarding such a scenario would likewise change.

You're right to call it a mere hypothesis. I hope that I made its tentative nature clear.

But that explanation of hers seems to me to be consistent with my hypothesis. No surprise, because it was part of the data that I was trying to fit when I constructed it.

I would be curious to know more about how she responded when you asked her, "So, are you consistently surprised when people undershoot your expectations?" Did she have anything more to say after repeating the question?

First I should state that I disagree with anonymous review for the same reasons that I disagree with an unaccountable judiciary - the negative effects on responsibility.

However, there are several problems with the theory in this essay - the most important being that the editors know who the writer or researcher is and can decide to go ahead and publish on that score no matter what the reviewers say. The editors have a strong incentive to advance novel but true theories in that it will advance the reputation of the journal.