Alex's Thought of the Day: Ego and sunk costs

It's very easy to wrap your ego into decisions you have made. It happens with technology (Playstation vs. Xbox, Apple vs. PC, etc.), cars, and even politics. I get the impulse- as a kid, I had a Super Nintendo, and it was really tough for me to try to carry on a conversation with someone who had a Sega Genesis. I couldn't possibly relate to someone who had chosen to purchase such a clearly inferior system.

If you unpack what I was thinking, it gets kind of silly. I had done some research- which was basically reading "Electronic Gaming Monthly". I trusted EGM, and since their editors had come to the conclusion that the SNES was the better system, I concluded the same. If it turned out not to be, that would have meant that EGM's staff was wrong. If they were wrong, I would have been dumb for trusting them, which was not acceptable.

The thing was, my favorite games were sports games, and in retrospect, they were clearly better on the Genesis. Sega had the "Mutant League" games, which were awesome, plus all of the Maddens were one year ahead in terms of the game engine on Genesis. It would have been smart for me to sell my Super Nintendo and jump to the other side, but I simply couldn't do that. I just played my inferior version of Madden every year.

I think that we're at the same place now with politics. Donald Trump is making huge mistakes seemingly daily, but his supporters can't say that he's a bad president. That would be like me saying Mario wasn't as good as Sonic.