[Link] “Proxy measures, sunk costs, and Chesterton's fence”, or: the sunk cost heuristic
Thought this post might be of interest to LW: Proxy measures, sunk costs, and Chesterton's fence. To summarize: Previous costs are a proxy measure for previous estimates of value, which may have information current estimates of value do not; therefore acting according to the sunk cost fallacy is not necessarily wrong.
This is not an entirely new idea here, but I liked the writeup. Previous discussion: Sunk Costs Fallacy Fallacy; Is Sunk Cost Fallacy a Fallacy?.
Excerpt:
If your evidence may be substantially incomplete you shouldn't just ignore sunk costs — they contain valuable information about decisions you or others made in the past, perhaps after much greater thought or access to evidence than that of which you are currently capable. Even more generally, you should be loss averse — you should tend to prefer avoiding losses over acquiring seemingly equivalent gains, and you should be divestiture averse (i.e. exhibit endowment effects) — you should tend to prefer what you already have to what you might trade it for — in both cases to the extent your ability to measure the value of the two items is incomplete. Since usually in the real world, and to an even greater degree in our ancestors' evolutionary environments, our ability to measure value is and was woefully incomplete, it should come as no surprise that people often value sunk costs, are loss averse, and exhibit endowment effects — and indeed under such circumstances of incomplete value measurement it hardly constitutes "fallacy" or "bias" to do so.
Tidbit: “Semantic over-achievers”
[I'd put this in an open thread, but those don’t seem to happen these days, and while this is a quote it isn't a Rationality Quote.]
You know, one of the really weird things about us human beings […] is that we have somehow created for ourselves languages that are just a bit too flexible and expressive for our brains to handle. We have managed to build languages in which arbitrarily deep nesting of negation and quantification is possible, when we ourselves have major difficulties handling the semantics of anything beyond about depth 1 or 2. That is so weird. But that's how we are: semantic over-achievers, trying to use languages that are quite a bit beyond our intellectual powers.
— Geoffrey K. Pullum, Language Log, “Never fails: semantic over-achievers”, December 1, 2011
This seems like it might lead to something interesting to say about the design of minds and the usefulness of generalization/abstraction, or perhaps just a good sound bite.
[Link] “How to seem good at everything: Stop doing stupid shit”
Possibly interesting article on winning: How to seem good at everything: Stop doing stupid shit
Summary, as I interpreted it: In practicing a skill, focus on increasing the minimum of the quality of the individual actions comprising performing the skill (because that is the greatest marginal benefit).
[This article previously posted as an open thread comment.]
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