[AlexandrB]

In my experience, people are better at rationalizing their feelings than actually being rational. There's a certain lack of humility to claiming that just because you used some numerical weights to arrive at a decision it was arrived at rationally.

[RationalDino]

Indeed the more complex and complete you make your rational model, the more tunable weights there are. By just dropping in the right weights, you can get whatever result you want. Therefore complex models tend to produce worse results in practice than very simple ones.

This lesson was brought home for me by https://www.amazon.com/Software-Estimation-Demystifying-Deve... explaining why the COCOMO model didn't work well in practice as an estimation technique, despite their having collected a lot of good data on what affects schedule.

This lesson is one that the EA community broadly seems to ignore.