"One of the most systematic errors in human perception is what psychologists call hindsight bias -- the feeling, after an event happens, that we knew all along it was going to happen. Across a wide spectrum of issues, from politics to the vagaries of the stock market, experiments show that once people know something, they readily believe they knew it all along."This is not to say that no one predicted the war in Iraq would go badly, or that the insurgency would last so long. Many did. But where people might once have called such scenarios possible, or even likely, many will now be certain that they had known for sure that this was the only possible outcome."
--Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post
Arnold Kling on hindsight bias:
Are health insurance companies guilty of denying care or, as Shannon Brownlee's new book argues, are they failing to prevent Overtreatment?
When it comes to surveillance and terrorism, are we not doing enough to prevent the next terrorist attack, or are we collecting too much unnecessary information?
In the mortgage market, are we making it too difficult or too easy for first-time homebuyers to purchase homes?
Would one have expected that the cost of restoring order after an invasion of Afghanistan to be relatively light compared to the cost of restoring order after an invasion of Iraq?
Most people approach these issues with hindsight bias. In situations of uncertainty, hindsight bias causes a number of problems.
Read the whole thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment