The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable · chapter 5 · id the-black-swan-c5-07-major-forecast-failures-includ
“Major forecast failures include the inability to predict the 2008 financial crisis, the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of the internet, and the COVID-19 pandemic -- all of which were explained as 'obvious' after the fact.”
VERIFIEDconfidence: high⚠ extracted by pipeline, re-audit pending
Receipts
Tetlock (2005), Expert Political Judgmentsource alive
Experts were systematically overconfident and showed strong hindsight bias, revising their stated prior probabilities upward after events occurred.
Ritholtz: After the Fact Explanationssource alive
Many people claim to have predicted the 2008 financial crisis despite all evidence to the contrary. The number of post-hoc claimants far exceeds those who actually positioned for the downturn before it happened.
Roese & Vohs (2012), Hindsight Bias Meta-AnalysisDOI registry: valid
Hindsight bias is robust across domains. People consistently overestimate how predictable events were before they occurred.
This claim is a stable, citable object. If you can falsify a verdict, tell us. Corrections are loud here.