Hindsight bias: after an outcome is known, it seems inevitable — "I knew it all along." The remembering self rewrites history into a coherent story (wysiati), inflating our past confidence and others' blame.
Kahneman ties it to the narrative fallacy (Taleb): we impose causality on random sequences. Outcome knowledge contaminates evaluation of decisions that were reasonable under uncertainty — the core tension in decision-quality-vs-outcome.
What to do
- Judge decisions by process and information at the time, not by outcome.
- Premortem and decision journals written before results.
- Kahneman's personal rule: be very thorough or completely casual on big decisions — partial deliberation produces the worst hindsight ("I almost chose better").
Sources
- thinking-fast-and-slow
- fooled-by-randomness — alternative histories