jwhendy comments on The Cognitive Science of Rationality - LessWrong

88 Post author: lukeprog 12 September 2011 08:48PM

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Comment author: jwhendy 16 September 2011 07:46:46PM *  9 points [-]
  1. Unpacking the components involved in a large task or project helps people to see more clearly how much time and how many resources will be required to complete it, thereby partially meliorating the planning fallacy.

The planning fallacy article seems to contradict this...

But experiment has shown that the more detailed subjects' visualization, the more optimistic (and less accurate) they become. (In saying this, EY cites the work of Buehler, 2002. [1])

Is there something from your citation (#26) that overrides the conclusions of Buehler? [2] In fact, #5 was the conclusion proposed in "Planning Fallacy," which I thought was made specifically because examining all the details was so unreliable. In other words, #5 seems to say: forget about all the details; just find similar projects that actually happened and base your timeline on them.


[1] Buehler, R., Griffin, D. and Ross, M. 2002. Inside the planning fallacy: The causes and consequences of optimistic time predictions. Pp. 250-270 in Gilovich, T., Griffin, D. and Kahneman, D. (eds.) Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

[2] For #6, you cited: Connolly & Dean (1997); Forsyth & Burt (2008); Kruger & Evans (2004).