The Functional Migration Problem

You’re alone in a quiet room when the concept hits: you’ve been defending a dead project because of what you already spent, not what you’ll gain. The recognition restructures your decision. Three months later someone deploys that same concept in a meeting to diagnose someone else’s error. The project continues anyway. A concept like “sunk cost fallacy” does real work in private. It carves a distinction the person couldn’t previously see, and seeing it changes what they do next. Posted as a tweet explaining why you should leave your partner, the definition and inferential structure remain identical. But the concept is no longer doing analytical work for the person using it. It is doing social work: signaling membership in a group that values rationality, providing a prefabricated justification for a decision already made, or—most commonly—establishing the speaker as someone who sees through error that others can’t. The concept hasn’t been dumbed down. It’s been repurposed. Why does the…