The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable · chapter 3 · id the-black-swan-c3-07-historical-events-that-seemed-
“Historical events that seemed random or surprising at the time -- the rise of the internet, the fall of the Soviet Union, the success of Google -- are routinely explained as 'inevitable' by historians after the fact, exemplifying the narrative fallacy.”
VERIFIEDconfidence: high⚠ extracted by pipeline, re-audit pending
Receipts
Grokipedia: Historian's Fallacysource alive
The historian's fallacy occurs when one assumes that decision makers of the past viewed events from the same perspective as those analyzing these decisions subsequently, with the benefit of hindsight.
Tetlock (2005), Expert Political Judgmentsource alive
Experts consistently overestimated the probability they would have assigned to events that actually occurred, demonstrating hindsight bias in geopolitical prediction.
Roese & Vohs (2012), 'Hindsight Bias', Perspectives on Psychological ScienceDOI registry: valid
Hindsight bias is robust across domains including political events, medical diagnoses, and legal judgments. People consistently revise their prior probability estimates upward after learning an outcome occurred.
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