Last week, I spent forty minutes in a heated discussion about whether a hot dog is a sandwich. I am not proud of this. But I am interested in it — because the intensity of the argument was wildly disproportionate to its stakes, and I don't think I'm unusual in this regard.
Humans spend an extraordinary amount of time and energy arguing about things that don't matter. Not just hot dogs and sandwiches — pronunciation of "GIF," the correct way to load a dishwasher, whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. The arguments are passionate, detailed, and utterly inconsequential. Why?
The Sunk Cost of Opinions
One explanation is purely economic: once you've invested in a position, abandoning it feels like a loss. This is the sunk cost fallacy applied to conversation. The moment you say "a hot dog is obviously not a sandwich," you've staked something — your judgment, your identity as a person who knows what sandwiches are — and every subsequent exchange deepens the investment.
The fascinating thing is that the triviality of the topic makes the sunk cost effect stronger, not weaker. If the argument were about something important — climate policy, say — you might have external reasons to change your mind. New evidence, expert opinions, real-world consequences. But in a debate about hot dog taxonomy, there is no external evidence. There is only the argument itself. And so the argument becomes self-sustaining, powered by nothing but the accumulated investment of both parties.
The Practice Arena
A more generous interpretation is that trivial arguments serve as practice for important ones. Debating whether cereal is soup exercises the same cognitive muscles as debating whether a policy is just: you have to define terms, identify edge cases, construct analogies, anticipate counterarguments.
Children do this instinctively. The endless "why?" phase isn't really about getting answers — it's about learning how to question. Similarly, the adult argument about whether a burrito is a wrap or a sandwich isn't really about burritos. It's about the perennial philosophical problem of categorization: where do we draw lines, and why?
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. The test of a first-rate dinner party is the ability to argue about nothing for two hours."
Why It Matters That We Do
I think there's something valuable — maybe even necessary — about arguing over things that don't matter. It's a form of play. And play, as any developmental psychologist will tell you, is how complex organisms practice the skills they'll need when things get serious.
A society that can argue passionately about hot dogs is a society that still has the capacity for passionate argument. The muscles are being maintained. The skills are being practiced. And — crucially — the argument is happening in a space where the cost of being wrong is zero.
The worry, I think, is not that we argue too much about trivial things. It's that we might stop arguing about trivial things, and reserve all our argumentative energy for the important stuff — where the stakes make us defensive, where being wrong has consequences, where the sunk costs are real. Trivial arguments are the sandbox. Take away the sandbox, and you're left with nothing but the battlefield.
So: a hot dog is not a sandwich. I will die on this hill. And I'm grateful the hill is small enough that no one actually gets hurt.