In no way defending the sloppy conference planning or how the former keynote speaker got screwed here, but...unless I'm missing something it seems pretty disproportionate to completely leave a community you've invested over seven years of your life in over sloppy conference planning, doesn't it? I feel like I'm missing something.
They reached out to him to give a talk he wasn’t ready to do. He obliges, works to make it happen, and gets blindsided by organizational politics. If he feels the organization and leadership neither respect him personally or his efforts, it’s a perfectly proportionate response.
Not sure how I’d react in his exact situation, but once trust and mutual respect are gone, so am I.
I agree it seems like a disproportionate act to take given the situation as the author described it, but this certainly does seem like the kind of scenario that involves a lot of context that goes unmentioned.
One explanation for this sequence of events is that the conference planners had since found a new compelling topic reflective of the project's direction to be covered in a keynote speech, in which case the natural topic to replace is one that discusses a "possible"/hypothetical idea. I'm sure there was a better way for leadership to handle this, in particular around communicating their intentions, but this shortcoming seems much more likely a case of incompetence rather than malice towards the speaker, given the lack of information to support the latter.
FWIW, the quoted thread makes it sound like the actual conference planners were no more than messengers here, so it may be fairer to summarize as ".. over capricious meddling in conference planning" or something like that.
No. The sunk cost fallacy involves sticking with something you know is the worse option (sticking with that option is the worse option) by appealing to the investment already made in that option as a justification. It does not mean that all appeals to investment are fallacious. If I invested 5 years in graduate school, and I'm a few months away from receiving my doctorate, it would not be categorically fallacious to argue that since I've already invested this much time, I should stick it out even if I'm thinking of pivoting. You would be losing a degree for what could be a vanishingly small benefit of leaving.
In line with that, the comment above is asking for some reason that could explain why someone who has invested so much time in something would leave so abruptly. A person who has worked on a project for so long derives (and provides) many benefits for having been involved for so long, and even when people change course, they don't typically do so this abruptly without a proportional reason. Hence, the mystery.
