Key Takeaways: The Sunk Cost of Consensus
The Big Idea
Once a wrong consensus is established (through the entry mechanisms of Part I), it is maintained by the enormous cost of abandoning it. Career investment, institutional reputation, textbook infrastructure, funding commitments, and identity investment create switching costs that far exceed any individual's capacity to absorb — ensuring the consensus persists long after the evidence turns against it.
Core Concepts
The Five Components of Switching Cost
- Career investment — Devaluation of professional work and expertise
- Reputational capital — Damage to field's credibility
- Textbook infrastructure — Coordination cost of revising training, guidelines, certifications
- Funding commitments — Obsolescence of current research programs
- Identity investment — Psychological cost of abandoning professional self-concept
The Cost Asymmetry Principle
- Cost of maintaining wrong consensus: distributed, invisible, borne by downstream victims
- Cost of acknowledging error: concentrated, personal, borne by practitioners who switch
- This asymmetry is the engine of persistence
Compound Sunk Cost
Sunk cost compounds over time — each year of additional investment builds on previous years. The longer a wrong consensus persists, the harder it becomes to correct. Time is the enemy of correction.
Coordination Game
Fields change en masse because the cost of individual early switching is devastating while collective switching is safe. This creates a waiting game that ends only when an external shock or generational turnover triggers coordinated change.
Diagnostic Table: Healthy Conservatism vs. Pathological Entrenchment
| Feature | Healthy | Pathological |
|---|---|---|
| Basis | Evidence | Investment |
| Standards | Symmetric | Asymmetric (higher for challenger) |
| Dissenters | Engaged | Punished |
| Threshold | Specific | Vague/shifting |
| Investigation | Active | Discouraged |
Epistemic Audit — Chapter 9 Addition
After this chapter: map the five switching cost components, identify the cost asymmetry, apply the diagnostic table.
What's Coming Next
Chapter 10: The Replication Problem — what happens when nobody checks the homework.
Quick Reference:
SWITCHING COST = Career + Reputation + Textbooks + Funding + Identity
Each component COMPOUNDS over time.
Correction speed ∝ 1/Switching cost