> You are just supposed to look at your options looking forward only. In most realistic scenarios your estimations of the payoff matrix has a significant uncer

> You are just supposed to look at your options looking forward only. In most realistic scenarios your estimations of the payoff matrix has a significant uncertainty. It isn't just that there is risk, but your estimation of the risk is uncertain as well (as well as your estimation of your estimation, and so on). When reasoning under uncertainty we can usually achieve significant benefits from regularizing the decision. "Do what everyone else is doing", "Keep doing what I was already doing", and "Do what is most consistent with my past investments" are time tested highly effective regularizers. When we are trying to rationalize taking actions that defy billions of years of evolved heuristics for reasoning under uncertainty we call the first 'bandwagon fallacy', the second 'status quo bias', and the third 'sunk cost fallacy'. There is often a fine line between rational decision making and rationalization. Awareness of the ways that people sometimes make errors in their decisions can be useful, but one should take care to avoid using a little bit of knowledge to come up with specious justifications for poor choices. Much of the time I see the word 'fallacy' used it sure seems to be sophistry. When a reasoned position is better you can just state why its better outright and the justification will stand up on its own merit without any invocation of a named fallacy.