Why does Hofstadter's law happen?

Hofstadter's law: Even when you take Hofstadter's law into account, it will always take you longer than you think to complete the task.

It shows up because timelines are emergent, based on beliefs, expectations, etc.

There's a recursive loop.

People update their estimates based on what they believe.

Also, because the curve of effort to fidelity is fundamentally logarithmic, but we naively assume it's linear.