History & CultureMental model
Why every disaster looks predictable in hindsight.
Hindsight bias: once you know the outcome, it seems like the most likely one all along. Baruch Fischhoff showed in 1975 that people rated historical outcomes as far more foreseeable after learning them than groups who didn't know the result. Historians therefore have to keep asking: what did the people involved know on that day, and what didn't they?
Useful: Judge decisions by the information available before, not by the outcome after.
Source: en.wikipedia.org