"You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."
——
Professor Richard Feynman

As a skeptic, I know the importance of thinking logically. I also know that one should save for retirement and only go into debt for emergencies. I fell prey to the cognitive bias of being self-consistant:

A few years ago, my current girlfriend had her business hurt by the Pandemic. I offered to help and started to go into CreditCardDebt. When the debt hit a myriad dollars, I decided that this must end:

The rent on our home and her business were about the same. If we move into her business, and it continues to underperform, it would be about the same as closing the business and living in our home at-the-time. Her business needed a ShowerStall to be made habitable; so now, we figured at least a KiloU$D, probably 2 KiloU$D, and maybe 3 KiloU$D. We decided to go for it.

We learned that we had to break concrete. That alone costs a myriad (10,000) dollars. At this point, we signed nothing and paid nothing. We could have closed the business anstead and kept living in our place. Unfortunately, we paid for the renovations instead:

By the time the dust literally settled, ¡we spent over 20 thousand dollars! ¡We tripled our debt to over 30 thousand dollars!

¿What went wrong?

We already mad the decision to move into her business. We accepted that we would have to spend money for the ShowerStall. When we learned that the work would cost a over a magnitude (to times), what we anticipated, we should have reconsidered, but we did not. We fell prey to the cognitive bias of self-consistancy; we decided already and stuck to our decision when things changed radically, even though, at that point, we signed no contract and spent no money.

This is the principle of the Socratic Method used by pushy peddlers getting people to a gree to my things by getting them to agree to other things 1stly.

¿Why do I write this mea culpa?

As a warning to thers to think logically and consider all major decisions carefully, and then to reconsider them, if things change. I also write this out of Epistemic Responsibility:

"It is wrong, always, and, everywhere for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."
——
W. K. Clifford