blind-outside-view
Installation
SKILL.md
Outside View
Overview
Kahneman & Lovallo (1993, Management Science); Kahneman & Tversky's planning fallacy (1979); operationalized as Reference Class Forecasting (Flyvbjerg, 2006; mandatory for large UK transport projects since 2004 via HM Treasury/DfT, with Denmark following in 2006–08). The inside view builds a forecast from the case's specifics — your plan, your steps, your skill — and systematically fails, because the specifics you can see exclude the disruptions you can't (the unknown unknowns are, by construction, not in your scenario). The outside view ignores the specifics and asks: what happened to everyone else who did roughly this?
The blind spot: "this case is different" feels true for every case, which is exactly why base rates beat scenarios.
When to Use
- Any time/cost/effort estimate ("2 hours", "by Friday", "one sprint")
- Predicting success odds of a launch, refactor, migration, startup, diet
- A plan justified entirely by its own internal logic
- Reviewing someone's confident single-point estimate