I grew up in Long Island 20 miles from JFK airport. We could see the Concorde once in a while at JFK airport and if we were very lucky we would see it landing or taking off. The amount of mindspace in the world occupied by that beautiful plane was gigantic compared to that occupied by most other planes. Whether the Concorde was still a net deficit to the UK and France would require, I think, a calculation similar to figuring the deficit or surplus to the U.S. of putting people on the moon.
You might be right—as I never saw one—but the project didn’t start with a plan to built a spectacular flying sculpture. So they fell first to the planning fallacy (which may not be so much a psychological cognitive bias but the very structure of possible outcomes of everything—the top of the frequency distribution is to the right of the “arrival” time), then to sunk costs which later were half acknowledged, thus making them highly suspicious of trying to resolve a cognitive dissonance (rationalization).
One has to take into account the original prediction to make a probabilistic interpretation…
I grew up in Long Island 20 miles from JFK airport. We could see the Concorde once in a while at JFK airport and if we were very lucky we would see it landing or taking off. The amount of mindspace in the world occupied by that beautiful plane was gigantic compared to that occupied by most other planes. Whether the Concorde was still a net deficit to the UK and France would require, I think, a calculation similar to figuring the deficit or surplus to the U.S. of putting people on the moon.
You might be right—as I never saw one—but the project didn’t start with a plan to built a spectacular flying sculpture. So they fell first to the planning fallacy (which may not be so much a psychological cognitive bias but the very structure of possible outcomes of everything—the top of the frequency distribution is to the right of the “arrival” time), then to sunk costs which later were half acknowledged, thus making them highly suspicious of trying to resolve a cognitive dissonance (rationalization).
One has to take into account the original prediction to make a probabilistic interpretation…