Consciously, I am thinking “Let’s think this through together to figure out if it’s worth doing,” not “how can I convince him to approve this?” I’m not at all convinced that the difficulty of lying extends to the difficulty of maintaining a mismatch between conscious reasoning and various subconscious processes that feed into estimates.
I’m imagining signs during the conversation like: If it starts to look like some other project would be more valuable than the idea you came in with, do you seem excited or frustrated? Or: If a new consideration comes up which might imply that your project idea is not worth doing, do you pursue that line of thought with the same sort of curiosity and deftness that you bring to other topics?
These are different from the kinds of tells that a person gives when lying, but they do point to the general rule of thumb that one’s mental processes are typically neither perfectly opaque nor perfectly transparent to others. They do seem to depend on the processes that are actually driving your behavior; merely thinking “Let’s think this through together” will probably not make you excited/curious/etc. if your subconscious processes aren’t in accord with that thought.
The relevant comparison is if you know you are going to arrive at either 12:15 or 12:05 equiprobably—do you say “12:10” or “12:07″? Or, if you are giving a distribution, do you say that the two are equiprobable, or claim a 2⁄3 chance of 12:05?
These are subtle enough differences so that I don’t have clear intuitions on which ETA would lead me to have the most positive impression of the person who showed up late.
I agree with your broader point that there are social incentives which favor various sorts of inaccuracy, and that accuracy won’t always create the best impression. My broader point is that there are also social incentives for accuracy, and various indicators of whether a person is seeking accuracy, and it’s possible to build a community that strengthens those relative to the incentives for inaccuracy.
I’m imagining signs during the conversation like: If it starts to look like some other project would be more valuable than the idea you came in with, do you seem excited or frustrated? Or: If a new consideration comes up which might imply that your project idea is not worth doing, do you pursue that line of thought with the same sort of curiosity and deftness that you bring to other topics?
These are different from the kinds of tells that a person gives when lying, but they do point to the general rule of thumb that one’s mental processes are typically neither perfectly opaque nor perfectly transparent to others. They do seem to depend on the processes that are actually driving your behavior; merely thinking “Let’s think this through together” will probably not make you excited/curious/etc. if your subconscious processes aren’t in accord with that thought.
These are subtle enough differences so that I don’t have clear intuitions on which ETA would lead me to have the most positive impression of the person who showed up late.
I agree with your broader point that there are social incentives which favor various sorts of inaccuracy, and that accuracy won’t always create the best impression. My broader point is that there are also social incentives for accuracy, and various indicators of whether a person is seeking accuracy, and it’s possible to build a community that strengthens those relative to the incentives for inaccuracy.