Behindsight and bias

Shankar Vendantam is a stupid, lazy amnesiac, which is to say a reporter for The Washington Post.

Vendantam covers the "human behavior" beat, writing Monday about the "hindsight bias." That's actually an interesting phenomenon, and Vendantam has some useful things to say about its affects and implications for things like juries and eyewitnesses. But anything constructive in Vendantam's piece is overwhelmed by the wretched opening paragraphs, which serve only to make people less well informed than they were before they picked up The Post:

Antiwar liberals last week got to savor the four most satisfying words in the English language: "I told you so."

This was after a declassified National Intelligence Estimate asserted that the war in Iraq was creating more terrorists than it was eliminating. For millions of people who opposed President Bush's mission in Iraq from the start, this was proof positive that they had been right all along. Yes, they told themselves, we saw this disaster coming.

Only . . . that isn't quite true.

One of the most systematic errors in human perception is what psychologists call hindsight bias -- the feeling, after an event happens, that we knew all along it was going to happen. Across a wide spectrum of issues, from politics to the vagaries of the stock market, experiments show that once people know something, they readily believe they knew it all along.

This is lazy and stupid. (Sorry too repeat that, but I read something like this and I get a little dumbstruck, so to speak, like a tourist standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon unable to say anything for the first 10 minutes other than, "Big. It's so big.")

Vendantam makes a huge, and hugely inaccurate, dismissive generalization, unsupported by a single concrete example or statistic. It's positively Jenkinsian.

Vendantam starts to get it wrong with the first two words -- "Antiwar liberals" -- implying that the invasion and occupation of Iraq had only ever been opposed by lefty hippie types and not also by paleoconservatives, realists, Niebuhrians, Kennanites, Pope Benedict and the College of Cardinals, and gung ho, hoo-ah military types like Richard Clarke and David Hackworth.

Oh, and also by millions of people all over the world who marched in the largest mass demonstrations ever seen in the history of planet earth. Those millions of people, not all of them liberals, held signs, chanted slogans, made speeches, gave interviews and wrote letters to the editor. And many of them -- millions of them -- predicted exactly what Vendantam says they could not have predicted.

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.

There's a bit of back-pedaling qualification later, as Vendantam changes the standards:

This is not to say that no one predicted the war in Iraq would go badly, or that the insurgency would last so long. Many did. But where people might once have called such scenarios possible, or even likely, many will now be certain that they had known for sure that this was the only possible outcome.

The goal post here is shifted dramatically. Vendantam starts by saying that no one "saw this coming," and here shifts to no one saw this as "the only possible outcome."

Here is further evidence that Vendantam doesn't have a clue about the subject. "The only possible outcome" was never the language of those who opposed this calamitous misadventure. That tunnel-vision certainty was the language of its proponents. The opponents of this war spoke instead in terms of probabilities, of what was likely, almost always with the caveat "I hope and pray that I'm wrong."

Vendantam never heard, never listened to, our initial and ongoing opposition to this war. Anyone who did so would realize that none of those millions who predicted exactly this lethally disastrous outcome now finds a shred of satisfaction in having been proved right.

If Vendantam wants a psychology reporter's angle on this matter, here's one worth exploring: Why is it that the people who weren't foolishly, disastrously wrong four years ago and now, by virtue of having been right all along, disqualified from participating in the debate on how to resolve this FUBARpocalyptic fiasco?

Comments

[sdf (Stu)]

It is ... almost beyond belief and yet perfectly believable.

And such a simple logical error. Just because hindsight bias suggests that people tend to think they knew it all along when it fact they didn't doesn't mean that some people didn't know it all along. In other words, what you said at much greater length and more eloquently.

Perhaps Fred Hiatt peaked across the newsroom wall and suggested he throw in a random potshot at "antiwar liberals?"

[Duane]

Do I detect a whiff of "I told you they'd say I told you so!" from Vendantam?

[Jesurgislac]

Shankar Vendantam sounds like a perfect example of hindsight bias...

[the bunny]

I knew this misadventure would devolve into civil war. Water is wet. Objects fall down. The sun will come out tomorrow. While there are conditions under which these things are not true (non-standard temperatures and pressure, intial velocity greater than escape velocity and cloudy days) under the normally accepted conditions by which the layman makes predictions, no sane man would bet his life or the lives of American Soldiers on any other outcome.
Iraq was a metastable state, before President CooCoo Bananas began securing his legacy. Lacking Saddam Hussein's intimate knowledge of all the players in Iraq, no army but his could prevent civil war.
The words do not exist to describe how boneheaded it was to initiate this "preemptive war". My prediction is that "dubya" will become that word since "rummy" is already in use.

[Scott]

Why is it that the people who weren't foolishly, disastrously wrong four years ago and now, by virtue of having been right all along, disqualified from participating in the debate on how to resolve this FUBARpocalyptic fiasco?

If you don't "believe in" a govt program, you have no business interfearing with those who do. All govt activity, left or right, is justified w/ the same empty rhetoric.

[Rhythm]

Just in case you were wondering "what do libertarians think?"

[reverter]

Here's what I wrote to that hack:
You are wrong, wrong, wrong. I know what I knew before March, 2003. I knew that many people in position to know didn't think the Bush administration's rationales and causi belli were valid or fact-based; Seymour Hirsch comes to mind, as well as many former CIA agents and military experts.
Please refrain from printing such facile bs about important issues of the day.
I resent like hell your implications that people who opposed Bush's illegal war are somehow deluded. Did you ever stop to consider how Cheney might be deluded when he states that he "never said" it was "pretty well confirmed" that there was a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda? Come on, idiot, get real. You and the D.C. establishment are the ones with "hindsight bias". You swallow Cheney's statement without blinking (must taste good!), but attack honest people with the resources to find out that everything your paper, the putrid Post, tried to hand us about the big threat Saddam's wmd's posed. Your editorial writer, Hoagland was so deluded, he forgot that he had chided the CIA before the war for being too cautious about the existence of wmd's; then after none were found, editorialized about how the CIA should have given us better intelligence about the lack of existence of the same. Don't you former kindegarteners know, there are recording devices and archives?

[LL]

Back when I went J school, it was the job of the media to question government, not prop it up and help it minimize the opinions of those who don't believe everything the president says. Guess those days are over. WaPo is a D.C. paper, not surprising to me they go out of their way to say that nobody knew what was to come, so Congress, major media and the voting public aren't a bunch of idiots after all for enthusiastically signing on to a military effort that was ill-defined and thus ill-advised from the beginning. Plus, journalism loves war, so of course they're going to try to mitigate their responsibility for helping to popularize it back when some honest skepticism could have prevented it altogether. Media outlets are more than happy to have a good, cracking war to write lengthy elegiac stories about. They love death and destruction, makes for good copy, good photos and video and it usually gets awards for the people who produce those things. Not that the war/s shouldn't be covered, just sayin'. Why go to the trouble of telling people things they don't already know/believe when you can wave the flag, show them some wrenching scenes of destruction and reinforce what they already think they know?

[Duane]

Scott, yer turn in the Human Readers thread. Do you need a link?

[Steve]

I knew we weren't going to get justice when, a year or so after the war started, they started reporting on the inaccuracies of Colin Powell's speech at the UN...and the media bought the line that we were misled by bad intelligence. And I was screaming, "but I read a debunking of Colin Powell's testimony on Slacktivist two days after his testimony!"

[Jeff]

Rhythm:
Just in case you were wondering "what do libertarians think?"

I think the better question is "Do libertarians think"?

[Joyful Alternative]

My letter to the editor:
No doubt someone somewhere is claiming early opposition to the war in Iraq
on the basis of hindsight bias, but I haven't heard from them yet. All of us
reality-based people---what you refer to as "antiwar liberals," as well as
President Bush's presiding United Methodist bishop, most military and
intelligence analysts, Goldwater-type conservatives, millions of street
protesters, and assorted others---said it was a dumb idea in 2002, said it
was foolish and/or criminal in 2003, then hoped for the best, and now wish
history had gone otherwise.
And I'll state now, for the record: I'm against the war in Iran and I'm
against the war in North Korea.