Today's post, Make an Extraordinary Effort was originally published on 07 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
It takes an extraordinary amount of rationality before you stop making stupid mistakes. Doing better requires making extraordinary efforts.
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was On Doing the Impossible, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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Two days ago I walked a long distance to buy some furniture off craigslist. I finally go there, and it wasn't that great.
I found myself trying to come up with a reason to buy the furniture anyway to justify the walk. I recognized that I was falling victim to the sunk-costs fallacy. I then proceeded to buy said furniture anyway.
Turns out rationality is, in fact, pretty hard.
Are you sure you weren't trying to justify buying the furniture in order to not disappoint the person you were buying it from? Not wanting to be awkward is the main reason I find myself going through with things I know are stupid.