Randy Ridenour has an interesting post on Emacs and sunk costs. His post is in reaction to the idea that using Emacs requires a lot of learning and customization and that those efforts are sunk costs. That is, they’re costs that you’ve already paid and will never get back. All of that is true and Ridenour agrees.
What he doesn’t agree with is the conflation of “sunk cost” and “the sunk cost fallacy”. The sunk cost fallacy is, roughly, the idea that you should continue with some activity simply because you have so much invested—so much sunk cost—in the activity. Everyone has experienced it. Ridenour gives a common example that we’ve all dealt with: the refusal to hang up while waiting to talk to a representative on a support call because we’ve got so much time already invested.
The proper way to think about sunk cost is to imagine you got where you are for free and decide what you should do next without considering how you got there. In the case of Emacs, Ridenour says, that means to imagine you’ve never used an editor and that the expert you consults tells you that he can give you
- A ready to use editor that works well but requires you to do things its way or
- An editor that is custom built for you, that works the way you want it to, and that has commands that only you care about.
The rational choice is obvious. That’s why Emacs users keep using Emacs. Not because they have so much invested in it but because Emacs is the best editor and can be adjusted to continue being the best editor as their needs change.