> be gwern > notice I don't have socks > write 10,000+ words on not having socks > four years later > still haven't bought socks I believe there's a sci-fi

> be gwern > notice I don't have socks > write 10,000+ words on not having socks > four years later > still haven't bought socks I believe there's a sci-fi/fantasy novel by Alan Dean Foster in which he writes about a trap in a standard dungeon on a mountain which is a path that just very slowly gets steeper and steeper. At first, you don't think you need anything to deal with it, so you're not in mountaineering gear, but at some point you've been gradually lulled into walking down a path you can no longer return up. I don't think it would work in real life but it was a neat idea. In particular, I don't think it works if you can easily see out ahead of you. But in real life, there's plenty of cases like this where you either can't see out ahead of you, or it's too cognitively expensive, or it simply never crosses your mind to think. I think a lot of the subtle controls exerted in society are like this... you are gradually corralled into doing things you never would have agreed to do if asked baldly, or if you could see that's where you were going to end up, but one step at a time you slowly walked somewhere you never would have voluntarily gone until it would be very expensive to get back out, and it's easier just to take the next step down. While I sometimes wonder if this is deliberately done, it is also certainly a situation that can arise naturally in many cases. Investing has a lot of cases like this... it's really easy to be unwilling to accept a loss or something and take the next step down the road of losing more, when you should pay the price, bail out, and accept the initial loss.