srdiamond comments on My Algorithm for Beating Procrastination - LessWrong

81 Post author: lukeprog 10 February 2012 02:48AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 23 February 2012 04:23:10AM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: timtyler 23 February 2012 02:14:00PM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 February 2012 11:06:10PM 0 points [-]

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."