I guess this is an old debate, but not including these effects guarantees that your number is really wrong, at least if you are doing something fairly innovative. You end up accurately estimating a largely irrelevant number.
Perhaps you could get an external party who would be less biased in favour of your project to analyse this kind of thing? In the for-profit world this happens when you try to get external investors. I think this is relevant to your next project—if you don’t consider gains from experimentation you could choose something too conservative (though perhaps that is offset by people’s general overconfidence).
I think that sort of approach leaves far too much room for bias/​optimism. It would be hard for me to take a number generated this way seriously.
I guess this is an old debate, but not including these effects guarantees that your number is really wrong, at least if you are doing something fairly innovative. You end up accurately estimating a largely irrelevant number.
Perhaps you could get an external party who would be less biased in favour of your project to analyse this kind of thing? In the for-profit world this happens when you try to get external investors. I think this is relevant to your next project—if you don’t consider gains from experimentation you could choose something too conservative (though perhaps that is offset by people’s general overconfidence).