Summary
“Thinking in Public: Optimal quitting (#02)” discusses the concept of optimal quitting and the challenges people face when deciding to quit a course of action. The article uses the example of a board game called Deep Sea Adventure to illustrate the difficulty of knowing when to quit. It explores the Optimal Stopping problem, which refers to the challenge of determining the best time to give up on a particular endeavor. The article suggests that cultivating a ritual of dissent and seeking out critical feedback can help individuals quit optimally.
Highlights
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Why don’t we quit earlier? It’s not just social conditioning— there are a lot of cognitive biases at play here. We irrationally take into account the effort we’ve already expended in the past when making projections about the future (sunk cost fallacy). We don’t take into account opportunity costs. We place undue importance on things that we’ve built (the Ikea effect)— one of the reasons why developers shouldn’t be the only ones testing their code. We work so long that we experience an enmeshment of our jobs with our identities: what we do becomes who we are… and how can we quit who we are? And finally, we quit less frequently and more belatedly when we’re being observed.