>how did the "conventional intelligence" so grossly overstate the production Probably 1 word - fear. Or more explicitly fear of underestimating the figures; t

>how did the "conventional intelligence" so grossly overstate the production Probably 1 word - fear. Or more explicitly fear of underestimating the figures; that kind of thing can be fatal! The human factor in this example is huge (nearly a factor of 8 I think for some months) but you can see the same happening everywhere. No matter how precise the statistical estimates are a human will always think "yeh but they could......" :)