“I knew it all along.”
But did you?
Inspired by my poking around cognitive biases, I’ve picked up Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow for the third time. (I swear—this time I’ll finish it!) One of the biases you encounter in the section on “overconfidence” is the hindsight bias.
Hindsight bias hardly requires a definition—we all know about, and we still fall for it all the time. We even have (in English) an idiom for it: “hindsight is 20/20.”
And it sure feels that way.
Every pursuit we chase has a little magic hindsight bias sprinkled over it once I hear the result. I rarely find myself surprised by the result, win or loss. Hindsight bias is the creeping sense of inevitability that happens. It’s that internal chorus that whispers of course.
We are hard-wired with a drive to tell stories that make sense of our experience. But the stories we tell about the past are largely illusory.
Taylor Coe 