Hindsight Bias (Retrospective Distortion)

Dear Diary: On History Running Backward

Events present themselves to us in a distorted way. Consider the nature of information: of the millions, maybe even trillions, of small facts that prevail before an event occurs, only a few will turn out to be relevant later to your understanding of what happened. Because your memory is limited and filtered, you will be inclined to remember those data that subsequently match the facts, unless you are like the eponymous Funes in the short story by Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes, the Memorious,” who forgets nothing and seems condemned to live with the burden of the accumulation of unprocessed information. (He does not manage to live too long.)

I had my first exposure to the retrospective distortion as follows. During my childhood I had been a voracious, if unsteady, reader, but I spent the first phase of the war in a basement, diving body and soul into all manner of books. School was closed and it was raining mortar shells. It is dreadfully boring to be in basements. My initial worries were mostly about how to fight boredom and what to read next *—though being forced to read for lack of other activities is not as enjoyable as reading out of one’s own volition. I wanted to be a philosopher (I still do), so I felt that I needed to make an investment by forcibly studying others’ ideas. Circumstances motivated me to study theoretical and general accounts of wars and conflicts, trying to get into the guts of History, to get into the workings of that big machine that generates events.

Surprisingly, the book that influenced me was not written by someone in the thinking business but by a journalist: William Shirer’s Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941. Shirer was a radio correspondent, famous for his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It occurred to me that the Journal offered an unusual perspective. I had already read (or read about) the works of Hegel, Marx, Toynbee, Aron, and Fichte on the philosophy of history and its properties and thought that I had a vague idea of the notions of dialectics, to the extent that there was something to understand in these theories. I did not grasp much, except that history had some logic and that things developed through contradiction (or opposites) in a way that elevated mankind into higher forms of society—that kind of thing. This sounded awfully similar to the theorizing around me about the war in Lebanon. To this day I surprise people who put the ludicrous question to me about what books “shaped my thinking” by telling them that this book taught me (albeit inadvertently) the most about philosophy and theoretical history—and about science as well, since I learned the difference between forward and backward processes.

How? Simply, the diary purported to describe the events as they were taking place, not after. I was in a basement with history audibly unfolding above me (the sound of mortar shells kept me up all night). I was a teenager attending the funerals of classmates. I was experiencing a nontheoretical unfolding of History and I was reading about someone apparently experiencing history as it went along. I made efforts to mentally produce a movielike representation of the future and realized it was not so obvious. I realized that if I were to start writing about the events later they would seem more … historical. There was a difference between the before and the after.

The journal was purportedly written without Shirer knowing what was going to happen next, when the information available to him was not corrupted by the subsequent outcomes. Some comments here and there were quite illuminating, particularly those concerning the French belief that Hitler was a transitory phenomenon, which explained their lack of preparation and subsequent rapid capitulation. At no time was the extent of the ultimate devastation deemed possible.

While we have a highly unstable memory, a diary provides indelible facts recorded more or less immediately; it thus allows the fixation of an unrevised perception and enables us to later study events in their own context. Again, it is the purported method of description of the event, not its execution, that was important. In fact, it is likely that Shirer and his editors did some cheating, since the book was published in 1941 and publishers, I am told, are in the business of delivering texts to the general public instead of providing faithful depictions of the authors’ mind-sets stripped of retrospective distortions. (By “cheating,” I mean removing at the time of publication elements that did not turn out to be relevant to what happened, thus enhancing those that may interest the public. Indeed the editing process can be severely distorting, particularly when the author is assigned what is called a “good editor.”) Still, encountering Shirer’s book provided me with an intuition about the workings of history. One would suppose that people living through the beginning of WWII had an inkling that something momentous was taking place. Not at all.*

Shirer’s diary turned out to be a training program in the dynamics of uncertainty. I wanted to be a philosopher, not knowing at the time what most professional philosophers did for a living. The idea led me to adventure (rather to the adventurous practice of uncertainty) and also to mathematical and scientific pursuits instead.