Over confidence in safeguards, and underestimation of what can go wrong, like with natural disasters.
As for Japan, the inattention of the world has led to underestimation of a different danger.
But if she deserves credit for this, she deserves blame for a comparable failure: America's early underestimation of Boris Yeltsin.
Regardless, the actual result significantly surpassed market expectations, implying a gross underestimation of the Chinese New Year effect by the market.
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In its complaint, PI said Google's assertion that its face blurring system would result in a "few" misses was a "gross underestimation".
The longer-term underestimation is harder to pin down, but even more dangerous.
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There was an underestimation of how much work needed to be done, there had been changes of contractual relationships over time, and problems over resource availability.
Further, he surmised, the same underestimation likely applies to a wide range of technologies and products, which either barely resemble preceding goods and services or are wholly new.
Prof Louis Appleby, chairman of the government's National Suicide Prevention Strategy Advisory Group, said there was "nothing new" in finding probably underestimation of suicide numbers because of doubts about intent.
"As the use of narrative verdicts rises, so too may the underestimation of suicide, " he wrote in an editorial in the British Medical Journal, with colleagues from the Universities of Oxford and Manchester.
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