“Whatever is going on in the humans is also going on in the nonhuman animals,” said A. David Redish, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Minnesota and an author of the study....Smart-ass reaction: Scientists have sunk costs in the theory of evolution.
“Evolution by natural selection would not promote any behavior unless it had some — perhaps obscure — net overall benefit,” said Alex Kacelnik, a professor of behavioral ecology at Oxford, who praised the new study as “rigorous” in its methodology and “well designed.”
“If everybody does it, the reasoning goes, there must be a reason,” Dr. Kacelnik said.
Evolution-centered response: It doesn't matter that individuals suffer and die, only that some reproduced. If individuals realize that it's in their interest to be aware of the "sunk cost" problem as they decide what to do, it might help them live better lives for themselves, individually, but will they have a long line of descendants? The ultimate in a sunk cost is your own progeny.
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“Smart-ass reaction: Scientists have sunk costs in the theory of evolution.”
Althouse channels Tom Wolfe.
This is the real reason we, as all pack animals, bond with our family members and with non-family members of our group, (however defined). It has to do with the long-term survival of the group, even as all of its particular components die off quickly.
I agree with Cookie. Group behavior was an early adaptation to hunter gatherer social groups.
Then the Indo-Europeans came in, killed all the men, and raped all the women and here we are.
It's called the altruism gene.
Isn't equally possible that it doesn't have a negative effect, or at least not negative enough to be selected against, and so persists?
What is a fallacy in trying maximize shareholder returns this quarter, is utterly essential in other situations. Consider Edison’s attempts to make a functional bulb. I doubt the jack wagons who published this balderdash ever persisted after 100 failures at something, let alone 1000.
i had a friend named Dr. Ted (not a real doctor: he had a PhD, In SCIENCE!)
And Dr. Ted was a TOTAL believer in the fallacy of sunk costs. When he was fishing; if a fishing hole didn't produce fish in the first five minutes; he'd move on to somewhere else.
Dr. Ted never caught many fish.
The humans were taught to “forage” on a computer for videos of kittens, a dance competition, landscapes or bicycle accidents
Say what?
Nonhuman animals too can't predict the future.
The ultimate in a sunk cost is your own progeny.
For non-human animals perhaps. As far as humans are concerned progeny are prospective costs, ones they are more than willing to avoid.
their article explicitly states that the researchers believed that it took the same amount of calories for a mouse to sit and wait for a food pellet as it took to roam around looking for a food pellet. So the stupid mice would wait by a food dispenser waiting for food that they knew would come out in a while, rather than roaming around hoping that they Might find a different food dispenser that Might give them food quicker. This is in violation of fishing law.
NEVER Leave fish to find fish
What is a spider's web but a sunk cost?
The ultimate in a sunk cost is your own progeny.
Heh, no, it's exactly the opposite.
The article was an example of its subject, in that it was so boring you wished you hadn't started reading it in the first place, but skim along to the bitter end. The mice foraging for kitten videos in a rotten log was a nice touch, that I just made up.
Henry said...
What is a spider's web but a sunk cost?
It's an investment.
"Smart-ass reaction: Scientists have sunk costs in the theory of evolution."
Hence the proliferation of just-so stories.
Maybe they have their reasons?
From Instapundit this morning...
WHITE MAN’S BURDEN: How Venezuela Became China’s Money Pit. “Beijing is reportedly throwing good money after bad to the Latin American producer, but it has its reasons.”
Is "sunk cost" even a legitimate concept?
Is it another way of calling "x" a mistake? Being repeated.
Ferdnandistein the prize!
The article was an example of its subject, in that it was so boring you wished you hadn't started reading it in the first
Or another term for "leftism"
... but, read it to the end, And started over 🐒🐒🐒🐒🐒🐒
It's an investment.
It's both.
The dilemma (not fallacy) of evaluating a sunk cost is that the cost cannot be recovered. Spinning a better web in a different location may be a better investment in the long run, but to do so the first web must be abandoned. The cost is sunk.
The sunk cost fallacy is when a future decision is based on the cost already incurred rather than the cost-benefit difference of the decision itself.
The study indicates that the longer a mouse waited for the pellet, the less likely they were to bail on the wait and try a different pellet dispenser. Maybe it exposed a sunk cost fallacy. Maybe it just exposed impatient mice.
"Evolution by natural selection would not promote any behavior unless it had some perhaps obscure net overall benefit"
Which is at best a vast over-simplification. For example, a maladaptive trait might be physically linked to a more important adaptive trait (e.g., sickle-cell anemia vs. malaria resistance) and thus remain extant even though it's maladaptive.
For that matter, an organism does not need to be perfectly adapted to its environment to survive, it just has to be better adapted than its competitors in that ecological niche. Furthermore, a species that is exquisitely and perfectly adapted to its present environment likely will be radically un-adapted when the environment in which it lives inevitably changes, and thus such perfect adaptations likely will be wiped out.
To state the obvious: science is hard, confirmation bias everywhere, and (in part due to the difficulty/impossibility of conducting experiments) it's all too easy for those entranced with biological evolution to spin endless "Just So" stories that "just happen to" perfectly explain the way things are. And things areindeed just the way they are, but, that's not to say they also just had to come out that way or that the explanations uniquely or correctly explain why they did.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong" -- H.L Mencken
"sunk costs" are recorded for tax purposes.
If I stay at a baseball game where my team is down 9-0 in the 7th inning, that's not the sunk-cost fallacy. It's a balancing of the opportunity cost of staying against the probability-weighted fun of a comeback win.
If I think that the expected additional waiting time declines (or at least fails to increase) the longer I've already been waiting, so I keep waiting, that's not the sunk-cost fallacy. It might be an incorrect forecast, but it's not a fallacy.
It's the sunk-cost fallacy if, having realized at the entrance to the ballpark that I'd forgotten my ticket at home, I refused to buy a comparable ticket.
It is important to note- "sunk cost fallacy" is widely misapplied. Someone above gave the perfect counter-example above about Edison and the light bulb. Persistence at a task after repeated failure often works out eventually. We can't predict the future, nor can we know everything there is to know about a particular goal. Take fusion as an energy source- at present, there is no solid reason to expect that we will ever succeed in using it to provide economically useful energy production, but that isn't an argument for not trying to figure it out. In other words, we rarely know going in what will never succeed.
This study's conclusions are highly flawed - if I read the article correctly --because the animal knows ahead of time how long it is going to wait based on the tone. So, if the animal decides its willing to wait 30 sec for the food, that is not sunk cost analysis. The animal KNOWS its going to get food, after all. If the rat was made to wait an indeterminate amount of time, after putting in a fixed effort on a task (going through a maze, pulling levers) the we could see how long the animal was willing to wait before giving up.
Hope and Change ... Sunk cost = 8 years + bubble bursts.
We are all descended from the successful; our families all go back right to the beginning.The ancestors of every person alive now figured out the correct response to their environment and had children. Yet, despite this great pedigree, the people alive now have very varied cultural responses to their particular environment and varied individual responses also. Nothing tells us who will be the father and mother of the people alive 200 years from now. We know to some extent who will not be, those of us without children won't be ancestors. But who will be the ancestors? Royal families have died out, noble families gone by the thousand, Reform Jews are wiping themselves out, soldiers have died without children, most of the members of the eugenic societies had more wives than children, Silicon Valley is a dying breed. Yet among us there are people making choices such that somehow they, the children they raise, the grandchildren their children raise, the great-grandchildren their grandchildren raise and on and on will survive. Can we know in advance by sunk cost tests or any other way who these people are? I can't think of a way because there's no test I know that of that if you applied it backward you could say which of the people in our great-grandparents generation would have descendants in this or the next generation. We only know who did. It just sieves out rapidly and seems quite random.
The maxim "Survival of the fittest" is wrong -- It's actually "Reproduction of the survivors."
Thus the primary drive is reproduction followed slightly by survival. For example, the last act of a dying salmon is to drop it's eggs or milt. How many parents will go into debt for the sake of their children?
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