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timtyler comments on My Algorithm for Beating Procrastination - Less Wrong
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Hmm. AFAIUI, the planning fallacy is mainly a form of self-promotion. You probably don't want to get rid of the planning fallacy - or people are less likely to want to employ you.
You should try to estimate as good as possible (i.e. without falling into fallacies) for yourself. Then you can still decide it's best to lie (a.k.a. self-promote). But getting false information won't do you any good.
I just read the planning fallacy wiki article and was surprised to NOT see proposed what I have thought was a good reason for the persistence of the error. It is something like this:
Tell a manager and group they will get the task done in 3 months and they will get it done in 5 months.
Tell the same manager and group they will get it done in 5 months and they will get it done in 6 months.
I sorta guessed that the "fallacy" persisted because it increased productivity.
My anecdotal evidence on myself is good for this: I HATE having deadlines where I will have to work hard to meet them, but I do work much harder when I have them.
This kind of thinking about the fallacy seems related to Steve Jobs' "Reality Distortion Field." What happens is tremendously altered by what management says will happen. In my theory, planning is less for the purpose of planning and more for the purpose of creating an outcome, of distorting reality from what it would have been otherwise.
It might be true that lying about the amount of time it will take you to do something will get you a job; there are lots of things you can lie about that might get you a job.
Is your concern that doing away with the fallacy will make you a worse liar?
I am councilling exercising caution before broadcasting downgraded estimations of personal competence - in the hope of avoiding failures caused by the planning fallacy. This could very easily be one of the cases where evolution is smarter than you are.
If the finding that "when people made their predictions anonymously, they do not show the optimistic bias" is correct then, this isn't really much of a "fallacy" in the first place. It would then be more of a signalling strategy - broadly similar to putting in low dollar initial estimates in the hope of getting hired.
It might also be true that telling the truth about how long it will take me to do something will cause a planner who is using my inputs to estimate the overall project, and is accustomed to compensating for the planning fallacy in others, to miscalculate estimated time.
Of course, if they do that, there's a sense in which it's their fault rather than mine, which can matter when what we care about is assigning blame.
My usual way of splitting the difference is to give low, high, and most likely estimates. Pretty much uniformly, I'm then asked for a single number, and I ask which one they want and give it to them.
Depends on how these people evaluate you. If by your plans, then big plans help. If by your finished projects, then it helps to plan realistically. But you may use a filter: tell them only about your successful projects and don't tell about failed ones; a combination of big plans and list of successful projects should impress most. (This places some limits on the planning fallacy, because if it is too big, there may be no successful projects.)
When you are already employed, planning fallacy will help to impress your boss... but how impressed will they be when you miss the deadline? But this may disappear in team work -- the boss will remember your optimism and team failure, so you still appear more competent than your colleagues.
Of course, publicly overestimating your own abilities is not a strategy for every occasion. However, it seems pretty reasonable to assume that such behaviours are prevalent mainly because they have proved themselves to be effective in the past. If you axe such behaviours you may well face employers who are expecting them - and so incur a double downgrading of your percieved abilities.
Eliminating the planning fallacy may not necessarily help to avoid failure - and it could easily have personal negative consequences. Prospective avoiders of this "fallacy" should be aware of the potential costs they may incur.
The fallacy does seem to occur in contexts inconsistent with signalling however - e.g. when I plan how long it will take me to cook a meal, or work out.
Something typically only has to be beneficial on average for reinforcement learning to favour it. That is how many heuristics arise. Similarly, traits only need to be adaptive on average for them to be favoured by natural selection. Indeed: adaptation and learning are closely related.
Even that is not required. See: gambling addiction. Our ability to learn from reinforcement is not calibrated according to the ideal.
Sure: I should have used a different term in place of "beneficial".
Very true. Although in this case I think it becomes justifiable to call it a 'fallacy', since it's outside conscious control
What about that the planning fallacy is demonstrated even when there's no financial benefit or even public announcement? The planning fallacy derives from the availability heuristic: the events that hold you up are different each time, whereas the ones that take you forward are routine.
The "planning fallacy" page on Wikipedia offers quite a range of explanations - though not the one you mention, AFAICS. I don't pretend to know enough about the relative importance of these explanations to comment much on the topic - except to say that the "signalling" explanation I mentioned seems as though it is a pretty important one to me.
There's a standard debiasing approach for the planning fallacy. I don't know if the availability heuristic has been cited, but it seems to have been described: "When you want to get something done, you have to plan out where, when, how; figure out how much time and how much resource is required; visualize the steps from beginning to successful conclusion. All this is the "inside view", and it doesn't take into account unexpected delays and unforeseen catastrophes."