One of the arguments that I want to make is that estimating poorly is not restricted to the software industry (obvious in retrospect).Thank you. We have a weird obsession in software with ascribing characteristic deficiencies and unique blind spots to ourselves, and treating ourselves as children next to the real "grown-ups" in other fields. (I think we're overcompensating for the "arrogant nerd" stereotype.) In any profession they are aware of their stereotypical tendencies (their déformation professionnelle) and joke about it but don't get obsessed with their own inferiority or paralyzed by stereotype threat.
We don't even use it in a way that helps us find the best knowledge from other fields to apply to our own. We start with our own deficiencies, project some idealized version of another field to serve as the opposite, and then try to learn from our imagined idea of how that field works. Early in my career, this took the form of thinking that building architecture and construction did not suffer from the planning and execution difficulties that software did.
For example, in Austin the ownership group of the new soccer team is constructing a stadium that is planned to be ready for the start of the 2021 season. When I was a wee software developer in the early 2000s, I was taught that unlike our immature industry rife with childishness and careless arrogance, people who design and build physical structures are careful, methodical, mature, and too aware of the responsibility riding on their shoulders to make mistakes in design and planning. A stadium isn't some silly computer thing; it's part of a multi-billion dollar professional sports league with complicated travel logistics, bound by the obligation of tens of millions in presold season tickets! This responsibility is entrusted to serious people in a mature industry, and everything is planned out meticulously via responsible processes to avoid delays.
Seriously. This is how people in software, at least the ones I was exposed to, talked about how to improve the profession. The question was not, what can we learn from other fields that struggle with complicated design and schedule and budget problems, but what is personally wrong with people in software that we have not mastered this process that people in other fields OBVIOUSLY have.
But of course when talking to the season ticket sales rep, when we asked about the possibility of the stadium not being ready when the season starts, he said great question, construction delays happen, it has happened to other MLS teams in the past, and the league will rearrange the schedule so that the team plays nothing but road games for the first several months of the year and has their home games later. This has already been figured out, because the "mature" design and construction industry that meets its schedules through the magical power of seriousness only existed in the imagination of circa-2000 software process consultants.