[SEQ RERUN] Make an Extraordinary Effort
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.
Maybe you precommitted to buying it by choosing to walk.
I would’ve not-bought the furniture so I could walk back without carrying it.
We were already carrying furniture (part of why the 30-minute walk was so arduous and prone-to-sunk-cost-ing), and we were about to be picked up by a friend with a car.
Why did you not wait for the friend with the car before doing any of these furniture activities?
First of all, different utility functions (carrying the wooden stools was obnoxious but I’m starting from a position of “walking is [normally] fun,” and even annoying strenuous exercise ends with me feeling virtuous.)
But the more important answer is that the friend with car wasn’t coming for about 2 hours from the moment when we started walking, it was already late at night (around 9) and we wouldn’t have been able to pick up the other furniture at 11 in all likelihood (plus waiting for 2 hours was boring). Also we’re on a tight deadline to acquire all our furniture, for an event at our house this weekend.