Gwern_Branwen comments on Planning Fallacy - Less Wrong

41 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 September 2007 07:06AM

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Comment author: Gwern_Branwen 17 January 2009 08:56:33PM 4 points [-]

> 1) Procrastinating until the last moment to actually do the work (you have never heard of students doing that, have you?) :-). This is a common reason that no matter how long people are given to complete a task, they do not complete it on time, or do so at the last minute.

David, I think you're kind of missing the point here. The question is whether students could predict their projects' actual completion time; they're not trying to predict project completion time given a hypothetical version of themselves which didn't procrastinate.

If they aren't self-aware enough to know they procrastinate and to take that into account - their predictions are still bad, no matter *why* they're bad. (And someone on the outside who is told that in the past the students had finished -1 days before the due date will just shrug and say: 'regardless of whether they took so long because of procrastination, or because of Parkinson's law, or because of some other 3rd reason, I have no reason to believe they'll finish early *this* time.' And they'd be absolutely correct.)

It's like a fellow who predicts he won't fall off a cliff, but falls off anyway. 'If only that cliff hadn't been there, I wouldn't've fallen!' Well, duh. But you still fell.