en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy
Apart from psychological explanations, the phenomenon of the planning fallacy has also been explained by Taleb as resulting from natural asymmetry and from scaling issues.
- The asymmetry results from random events giving negative results of delay or cost, not evenly balanced between positive and negative results.
- The scaling difficulties relate to the observation that consequences of disruptions are not linear, that as size of effort increases the error increases much more as a natural effect of inefficiencies of larger efforts' ability to react, particularly efforts that are not divisible in increments.