Lest you think the distinction between epistemic and instrumental is merely a theoretical possibility, consider the following anecdote.
Since sometime last year, I have been using PredictionBook to track my daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly goals (I stopped making them public after someone complained) in order to develop a large enough reference class to draw from when making business decisions (in order to eliminate the need for my “gut feeling” variable in my forecasting rule). Over the course of half-a-year I almost completely overcame my susceptibility to the planning fallacy (at least, in the domain of medium-term business plans).
Then, in February, my first son was born. I had badly underestimated the adjustments I would have to make to my routines (stupid, I know) and started failing lots of my goals. This caused my forecasts to show that I was probably going to fail massively on several important projects. If you remember your procrastination equation, this essentially tanked my expectancy, decimating my motivation. This started a failure spiral that I didn’t recover from until only a few weeks ago (with the help of The Motivation Hacker).
Anyway, I think the take-away if this: yes, the outside view is very useful for accurately forecasting the future, but keep in mind that your psychological state is causually influenced by the very forecasts you make and this can easily lead to a self-fulfilling prophesy of failure.
Then again, you should take my analysis with a grain of salt. N=1 and all that.
Lest you think the distinction between epistemic and instrumental is merely a theoretical possibility, consider the following anecdote.
Since sometime last year, I have been using PredictionBook to track my daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly goals (I stopped making them public after someone complained) in order to develop a large enough reference class to draw from when making business decisions (in order to eliminate the need for my “gut feeling” variable in my forecasting rule). Over the course of half-a-year I almost completely overcame my susceptibility to the planning fallacy (at least, in the domain of medium-term business plans).
Then, in February, my first son was born. I had badly underestimated the adjustments I would have to make to my routines (stupid, I know) and started failing lots of my goals. This caused my forecasts to show that I was probably going to fail massively on several important projects. If you remember your procrastination equation, this essentially tanked my expectancy, decimating my motivation. This started a failure spiral that I didn’t recover from until only a few weeks ago (with the help of The Motivation Hacker).
Anyway, I think the take-away if this: yes, the outside view is very useful for accurately forecasting the future, but keep in mind that your psychological state is causually influenced by the very forecasts you make and this can easily lead to a self-fulfilling prophesy of failure.
Then again, you should take my analysis with a grain of salt. N=1 and all that.