Not falling prey to sunk cost fallacy, I would switch to the higher impact project and start afresh.
I have often fallen prey to over-negating the sunk cost fallacy. That is, if the sunk cost fallacy is acting as if you get paid costs back by pursuing the purchased option, I might end up acting as if I had to pay the cost again to pursue the option.
That is, if you already bought theatre tickets, but now realise you’re not much more excited about going to the play than to the pub, you should still go to the play, because the small increase in expected value is available for free now!
I don’t think that this post is only pointing at problems of the sort above, but it’s useful to double check when re-evaluating projects
It would also be useful to build an intuition of what the distribution of projects across return on one’s own effort is. That way you can also estimate value of information to weigh up against search costs.
Thanks for this post! I think it will make me more comfortable discussing EA in my extended friendship circle.
Which frames work best probably depend on the who you’re talking to*, but I think the two on global inequality are likely to be useful for me (and are most similar to how I currently approach it)
I particularly like how they begin with explicitly granting the virtue and importance of the more local action. Firstly, it’s true, and secondly, when I’ve seen people change cause focus it’s normally been because of arguments that go “helping this person is good, but the reasons for helping this person apply EVEN MORE here”.
Remembering to explicitly say that I think the local cause is important and moral is the behaviour change I’ll take away from this.
* For example, with most people I meet, I can normally take moral cosmopolitanism for granted