[Author’s note: I will be moving future Hammertimes to my personal page to avoid cluttering the frontpage. This one is sufficiently short and probably controversial to leave here.]

This is part 8 of 30 in the Hammertime Sequence. Click here for the intro.

It pains me to begin a post about planning with an announcement about two slight changes of plans for Hammertime:

First, I will be travelling the week after next, so there will be a week-and-a-half intermission between the first and second cycles.

Second, when I sat down to write a post about Focusing, I found myself unable to add anything productive to this excellent post: Focusing, for Skeptics. Focusing is probably the second most powerful technique I learned from CFAR, so I will return to it in future cycles after more thought.

Instead, I want to write three posts on planning. These are the first steps to becoming the kind of person who can make thoughtful long-term plans and follow through with them.

Day 8: Sunk Cost Faith

One of my main motivations ever since writing The Solitaire Principle is to solve the Control Problem in humans: the problem of making and following through with long-term plans and habits despite new information and, even worse, value drift. I propose that what is commonly known and vilified as the Sunk Cost Fallacy actually exists for a good reason and is a useful first-order solution to the Control Problem.

The Uncanny Valley of Sunk Cost

Related: Sunk Costs Fallacy Fallacy.

Here is the uncanny valley one falls into when one naively cancels out Sunk Cost Fallacy:

You suck at making plans, but follow through with them anyway. You get a moderate amount done by making overconfident and poorly-thought-out plans, and just doing them despite contradictory information.
One day, you learn about the Sunk Cost Fallacy. You decide to be a Good Rationalist and categorically abandon ship on projects that no longer appeal to you. You still suck at making plans. All your plans fail and you get nothing done.
Over time, you learn that you’re not the kind of person who can follow through with long-term projects. You jump from bright light to bright light, captured by the briefest caprice. You don’t remember what it’s like to be diachronic. Your time horizon shrinks and you stop bothering with plans at all.

There’s an extremely insidious demon hiding at Step 2, related to adverse selection. Over the course of a m...

Sunk-Cost Fallacy

Blog posts

See also