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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Some concepts in economics are so fundamental that they should be part of philosophy curriculum. Opportunity cost is one of those concepts. Scarcity forces resource allocations and choices to us. If nothing else, we can't be in two places at the same time (time is scare) so we have to make choices. How to value the cost of choice is fundamental to everything we do.

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It would be good to realize that it’s only useful to think about opportunity costs for future problems (opportunity is in the name). Once costs have been made in the past, they should have little weight in future decision making, hence the concept of sunk cost.

Decision making is also often not as cut and dry as the article suggests: once you throw probability, randomness and asymmetrical outcomes in the mix, it’s really hard to determine your true opportunity costs.

I've had my mind on this exact point for a while. But I'm slowly realizing that I tend towards new shiny things, like many people. And sometimes that project I've been grinding on for a couple years starts to look less appealing. So I lean on the argument that, 'hey, I put a lot of time into this. I should continue.' Continuing to work on the long boring project for this reason alone technically qualifies as the sunken cost fallacy. Yet it helps me override my internal *human bug I'm experiencing. That is, we associate boredom with a lack of progress.

This is when the concept of a "discount function" comes into play

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