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.”
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.”