7 years ago: Behindsight and bias

October 4, 2006, here on slacktivist: Behindsight and bias

It’s not like we’re talking about something shrouded in the mists of ancient history, some event from the dawn of time. We’re talking about 2002 and early 2003. Most people, unlike Vendantam, can still remember what was and wasn’t said 3-4 years ago, but even if your memories have grown fuzzy, there’s a paper trail, and a video trail, and a pixel trail. Vendantam could’ve walked down the hall to his colleague Walter Pincus’ office, where the senior reporter could have shown him stacks of articles and notebooks filled with quotations from people who said exactly what Vendantam says they only think they said due to “hindsight bias.” Or Vendantam could have called CNN and asked to borrow the hours and hours of videotape from all of, say, Kenneth Pollack’s scores of appearances on the network during 2002 and early 2003. Pollack often appeared in a “debate” format on CNN. Those people he was debating? They were right and he was wrong. And they said exactly the sorts of things that Vendantam imagines they only imagined having said.

Or, of course, Vendantam could have simply used Google to find the hundreds of thousands of articles and blog posts from the distant past of four years ago in which thousands of different people said exactly what Vendantam says no one ever said.