First: Music is only tenuously based on math. ‘Music is based on math’ is the kind of not-even-half-true junk elementary school teachers spout to cover for the fact elementary school math really isn’t all that useful once you’re no longer punished for using a calculator. Frankly, it would be much better to teach basic statistics in at least some of the time devoted to math at all grade levels.
Second: What? What does this have to do with anything else in this thread?
To clarify:
“Sunk cost” is the term the morons refuse to understand. It’s the concept that you can’t get a return on all investments and, at some point, the only rational action is to stop throwing money or other resources (time, attention, emotional energy, etc.) down the rathole. “Sunk cost” is most certainly not a fallacy; the fallacy is ignoring the concept.
That may apply to rational investors, assuming any such animal exists, but Mijin is exactly right that there is a huge psychological resistance to abandoning an invested-in belief. The term “sunk costs” can be applied here. English works that way.
I guess my phrasing made it seem like I was defining a formal fallacy, when what I was trying to do was just give a name to a common psychological error.
Derleth describes as “morons” those that don’t understand sunk costs, but the phenomenon I was describing is very common, probably something that we all do from time to time.
> I see it happen all the time to 13 year olds.
>
> Them: I don’t wanna study math! I’m going to play pro basketball!
> Me: You know Kevin Garnett, Kobe, and Vince Carter all went back to school to
> finish their college degrees?
> Them: Oh…then I’m going to be a rapper!
> Me: You know that music is based on math?
> Them: You suck!
I’ll ignore for the moment whether this is a good argument or not. My objection is that I can’t believe that you see this happen “all the time.” So do you live in the middle of a nearly all black neighborhood in the inner city, and do you spend all your free time acting as a mentor to the neighborhood kids? If not, how could you frequently be having such conversations? I’m a white guy with a masters in math living in a majority-black apartment complex where I probably have the highest annual income of anyone living there, and I can attest that no such conversations ever go on.
I had a friend who fervently believed that the moon landing was a hoax. Her belief was based on a television program she had seen that talked about it and internet research. No amount of arguing/making fun of her would change her mind. She actively propagated her opinion and we had many discussions about it. I was flabergasted by it because she otherwise seemed very down to earth and intelligent. I had completely given up on being able to change her mind.
Then, she saw the Mythbusters episode on the moon landing which said a lot of the same things that I had, but with better illustrations. She instantly admitted she had been wrong. It was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. It gave me hope that, if explained properly, some (though not all, I am sure) conspiracy theorists CAN be enlightened.
> Black/basketball… obviously, what was I thinking. Carry on.
Oh, come on. It’s obvious what Superhal really means. Wanting to be a basketball player, then a rapper. He couldn’t be straightforward enough to just say that these are black 13-year-olds. He just implied it so that he could convey the meaning that black kids have no realistic ambitions without quite saying it. I can’t imagine any adult having a conversation with 13-year-olds like Superhal is claiming.
That’s really hard to believe. A 13-year-old male who’s tall for his age is hoping for something that he has very little chance of achieving if he wants to be a professional basketball player. A 13-year-old male who’s short for his age and wants that is outright delusional. Were these kids on drugs? I find it hard to believe that there are that many kids out there with aspirations that are that ridiculous.
It didn’t occur to me that you were objecting to “fallacy” because you say yourself that continuing to invest in a lost cause is not rational. How can that action not be fallacious?
I think Mijin’s Wikipedia link explained this as well as it can be: I’m primarily objecting to a quirk of usage which I find confusing, namely the practice of using “sunk cost” to mean “can’t stop throwing money down the rathole” as opposed to “money you have already thrown down the rathole and won’t get back if you throw more down there” in the phrase “sunk cost fallacy”.
In short: Read the first line of the Wikipedia article. (“In economics and business decision-making, sunk costs are retrospective (past) costs that have already been incurred and cannot be recovered.”) Then try to make that definition square with the phrase “sunk cost fallacy” in a way that doesn’t revise the definition completely.
Firstly, in my original post that started this tangent, I used scare quotes around “sunk costs” – I was aware of the more formal economic meaning of this term, but I figured people would know what I meant.
Secondly, the sunk cost fallacy is just a fallacy that happens to involve sunk costs e.g. watching a movie, even though you’d rather not, because you’ve already paid for the ticket.
Having a fallacy that involves sunk costs no more broadens its definition than the masked man fallacy or nirvana fallacy broaden the definition of masked men or nirvana.