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The Value of Hindsight

Hindsight is more accurate than foresight. I know that Bill Clinton won the 1992 and 1996 Presidential elections, and that the Soviet Union fell apart. All of these were matters of speculation before the event. Now that the events are over, we can see how they happened, and how they were inevitable, can't we?

The past always seems clear in retrospect. We see how things happened, and we think that we should have been able to foresee what happened. This is wrong.

Psychologists have done studies on this. The basic idea is to come up with a situation with different possible outcomes. Present the facts of the situation to some people, and ask what the outcome is likely to be. Present the facts and various outcomes to other people, and ask them how likely that outcome was, and whether it was predictable in advance.

The result you will get is that people knowing the facts will not be able to predict the outcome, while those people who are told the facts and an outcome will say that the outcome is predictable, and will provide chains of reasoning to support it.

The lesson is that the past appears much clearer than it is. Historical figures sometimes seem stupid or confused over matters that are perfectly clear to us nowadays. Sometimes, granted, they were stupid or indecisive, but much of the time they simply didn't have the advantage of hindsight.

This sort of thinking is the foundation of many conspiracy theories. Many things have happened historically that have surprised the people who theoretically should have anticipated them. Some people have concluded, for example, that President Roosevelt must have known of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in advance, whereas the evidence at the time was far less conclusive, pointing at Japanese aggression somewhere in the near future.

This sort of thinking also distorts histories. People who make important decisions usually do so without complete information, and certainly without hindsight. It is obvious today that the British had no chance of repressing the rebellion in the American colonies after July 1776, and the best they could do was negotiate a way out. It was not nearly so obvious at the time. George III and Lord North had reasonable grounds to expect that they could regain the lost colonies by military action.