• About

Bespoke Blog

~ Science! Culture! Computational Engines!

Bespoke Blog

Daily Archives: July 21, 2011

Sunk Cost Fallacy

21 Thursday Jul 2011

Posted by bwkeller in philosophy

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

cognitive, fallacy

I consider myself to be a pretty rational person, and try to avoid the cognitive pitfalls that, as a human being, I am prone to falling into.  One logical fallacy that always seems to get me, no matter how much I try to banish that mode of thought, is the sunk cost fallacy.

This fallacy is the idea that you’ve already invested enough time/money/whatever into something, so to stop now would be a waste.  It has its root in a number of frailties, from loss aversion to simple pride. It is a fallacy though, because how much you have invested so far in a venture has no bearing on whether that venture is going to be a success or not.  If you wouldn’t have started it, it is wasteful to continue it, rather than the opposite.

Despite knowing full well the fallacious nature of it, whenever I am making a big decision, it always creeps into my head.  How about you, dear readers, what logical fallacy have you had the hardest time keeping out of your mind?

Finally, A Tablet I Can Get Behind

21 Thursday Jul 2011

Posted by bwkeller in ereader, gadgets

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

android, ereaders, technology, thinkpad

Thinkpad TabletShort post today, I overdid it and started a much longer post I can’t finish tonight, and I’m getting mighty tired.  Instead of that, let me point out a bit of exciting tech news from today:  Lenovo has release an Android tablet that actually looks like I might buy it.   A Thinkpad Tablet!

Continue reading →

July 2011
M T W T F S S
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031
« Apr   Aug »

Ben’s Tweets

  • RT @OJ_Astro: A blog post by physicist Syksy Räsänen (@SyksyRasanen), who has published with us twice, about why overlay journals are an an… 1 day ago
  • RT @JokesAstro: If the Islands of Hawaii were very massive stars, Kauai would be going supernova soon. https://t.co/NEboP6FRWd 2 days ago
  • RT @AnicaSeelie: @gauravmunjal Imagine if there was a duck but it had human ears 2 days ago
  • RT @jfmclaughlin92: Friendly reminder that if you're at a public university, your institutional email can be searched basically whenever. B… 2 days ago
  • @rcrain_astro Academia has a lot of problems. Precarious employment, massive overworking of junior researchers, poo… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2 days ago

Nicholas’ Tweet’s

  • RT @michielsdj: New paper! Retrieval-augmented models are expensive. Make them faster by partially pre-computing passage representations. W… 5 days ago
  • RT @michielsdj: New paper! We propose FiDO, an improved version of Fusion-in-Decoder with faster inference and better performance. Work don… 1 month ago
  • @_julianmichael_ @LukeZettlemoyer @emilymbender @nlpnoah @ssshanest Congrats! 5 months ago
  • RT @michielsdj: Now accepted to @iclr_conf! 🎆 1 year ago
  • @mjskay Yeah, I feel a major point people were missing is that an endless spiral into the drain is actually the perfect visual metaphor. 1 year ago

Top Posts

  • Basic Data Plotting with Matplotlib Part 3: Histograms

Tags

100daychallenge advertising astronomy bash biology blogs BMC books browsers Bulshytt calligraphy canada coding cognitive computers computer science css EEE elvish ereaders ethics evolution experiments facebook google government html humor humour ICP I hate this class iliad internet explorer irex java javascript lego letter libraries marketing materialism matplotlib maze mindstorms mods morality mysql networking neuroscience pens philosophy philsophy php Pilish prime minister programming psychology reading review robots science SENG servers sociology steampunk stupid technology time ubc UNIX url vim web web design writing

Blogs We Read

  • Bad Astronomy
  • Boing Boing
  • Rationally Speaking
  • Terry Project (UBC)

RSS Nicholas’ Terry Posts

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 162 other subscribers

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Bespoke Blog
    • Join 74 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Bespoke Blog
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...