Cracked has some great articles but none of them are as interesting and relevant as this one:
Read, memorize, keep yourselves in check. :tup:
Here’s the third one:
#3 Throwing good money after bad money
The competitive instinct is not just a phrase football commentators invented to give words to the tingly feeling they get watching Brett Favre play football. Our brain’s natural tendency towards competition is arguably the reason your family survived the hunter gatherer knife fight of 2000 BC.
And as countless uninspired armies and poorly coached teams have demonstrated throughout the years, your ability to compete tends to be directly proportional to your ability to convince yourself that you’re doing the right thing. This leaves us with a brain that loves to compete, and is awesome at convincing itself that it’s right.
In the financial realms, when these two instincts collide, your brain will play a retarded game of chicken with reality that economists have termed “irrational escalation of commitment”.
As we’ve already established, when faced with the prospect of a $3,000 repair on your shitty car, or purchasing a slightly less shitty car for $2,500, your brain will tell you to go with the repairs because you “already sunk ten grand into the shit box.” (Yes, we just quoted your brain. It talks like a little girl. Deal with it.) But what happens the next time your car needs a repair? Well thanks to something behavioral economists have termed post-purchase rationalization, your brain will have convinced itself that the last decisions was a great idea. And since you’ve now sunk 13 grand into the shit box, it’s going to seem like an even better idea to keep piling up the bad decisions.
Throw in a little competitive instinct and pride, and it’s not hard to see how this can go horribly, horribly wrong. Your brain will keep pushing your head further and further up your ass, piling up bad decisions with the ferocity of a rabid Glenn Beck.
The real world implications are everywhere, and tragic. For instance, it can justify escalation of a war. In 2005 America’s President said that we “owed” the 2,000 American soldiers who had died in Iraq to “finish the task that they gave their lives for.” Regardless of what your politics were, to a certain part of your brain, that sounds like a logically constructed argument. Why do these men have to die? Because these other men died, of course! And only the deaths of these additional men will cause those first men to come back to life!
After all, what else can we do, cut and run?