CONCEPT
Hindsight Bias and Creeping Determinism
The tendency to see past events as having been inevitable after learning the outcome — the mechanism by which surprise becomes 'obvious in retrospect' and five-stage patterns appear to predict.
Hindsight bias is the cognitive distortion that makes known outcomes seem more predictable than they were before they occurred.
Tetlock adopted Baruch Fischhoff's term 'creeping determinism' to describe the insidious process: once an event happens — the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 2008 financial crisis, the ChatGPT moment — the mind reorganizes prior information into a narrative that points toward the outcome. The narrative feels explanatory. It is actually retrospective, a story constructed after the fact that borrows the emotional conviction of hindsight and presents it as analytical understanding. The five-stage pattern of technological transition that Segal describes is hindsight bias formalized: a template that fits every transition perfectly in retrospect but provides almost no predictive power about the next one.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Fischhoff's original demonstration was disarmingly simple. Subjects read descriptions of historical events with ambiguous outcomes (a nineteenth-century war between the British and the Gurkhas). Half were told the British won; half were told the Gurkhas