Deception and Intelligence

I recently read a book called The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life . Robert Trivers writes about how and why animals and humans try to deceive each other.

Trivers opens the book with a discussion of animal behaviour. In particular, he mentions the cuckoo. Cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds' nests and thereby get out of the effort of roosting and feeding the newborns.

Some of these birds have learned to count their eggs. If they find that there are more eggs in their nest than they laid, they abandon the nest and go somewhere else.

So to counter this the cuckoos have learned that when they lay an egg in some other bird's nest, they should push one of the existing eggs out of the nest.  Then the count is the same.

To counter this, the other birds have learned to look for broken eggs on the ground below their nests.

In this way, both the cuckoo and the other birds are constantly learning different strategies to deceive and counter the deception.

Trivers suggests that this deception and counter-deception is how intelligence has been formed over time.  Also it happens much faster than evolution would suggest.

We have seen in earlier posts that project managers tend to have an optimism-bias.  They believe their projects will come in on time and on budget.

They may be attempting to deceive the senior decision makers. According to Trivers, the decision makers should be learning from this deception and trying to counter it. 

I have not seen this type of learning taking place.  Senior decision makers do not appear to be attempting to counter project managers' optimism bias.

The only person who I have seen who appears to be recommending that this deception should be countered is Bent Flyvberg.

I recommend Flyvberg's article “Over Budget, Over Time, Over and Over Again” found here and his books Megaprojects and Risk and Decision-Making On Mega-Projects in which he suggests methods to counter project managers' optimism bias.