I’d probably put it this way – the Sunk Cost Fallacy is Mostly Bad, but motivated reasoning may lead to frequent false positive detections of it when it’s not actually relevant. There are two broad categories where sunk cost considerations come into play, a) cases where aborting a project feels really aversive because so much has gone into it already, and b) cases where on some level you really want to abort a project, e.g. because the fun part is over or your motivation has decreased over time. In type a cases, knowing about the fallacy is really useful. In type b cases, knowing about the fallacy is potentially harmful because it’s yet another instrument to rationalize quitting an actually worthwhile project.
You can use a hammer to drive nails into walls, or you can use a hammer to hurt people. The sunk cost fallacy may be a “tool” with higher than usual risk of hurting yourself. This is probably a very blurry/grayscale distinction that varies a lot between individuals however, and not a clear cut one about this particular tool being bad. But I definitely agree it makes a lot of sense to talk about the drawbacks of that particular concept as there is an unusually clear failure mode involved (as described in the post).
I’d probably put it this way – the Sunk Cost Fallacy is Mostly Bad, but motivated reasoning may lead to frequent false positive detections of it when it’s not actually relevant. There are two broad categories where sunk cost considerations come into play, a) cases where aborting a project feels really aversive because so much has gone into it already, and b) cases where on some level you really want to abort a project, e.g. because the fun part is over or your motivation has decreased over time. In type a cases, knowing about the fallacy is really useful. In type b cases, knowing about the fallacy is potentially harmful because it’s yet another instrument to rationalize quitting an actually worthwhile project.
You can use a hammer to drive nails into walls, or you can use a hammer to hurt people. The sunk cost fallacy may be a “tool” with higher than usual risk of hurting yourself. This is probably a very blurry/grayscale distinction that varies a lot between individuals however, and not a clear cut one about this particular tool being bad. But I definitely agree it makes a lot of sense to talk about the drawbacks of that particular concept as there is an unusually clear failure mode involved (as described in the post).