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srdiamond comments on My Algorithm for Beating Procrastination - Less Wrong
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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.
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."