Hindsight Bias: “The commission itself, with its mandate, may have compromised its report before it is even delivered. That mandate is ‘to provide a `full and complete accounting’ of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and recommendations as to how to prevent such attacks in the future.’

It sounds uncontroversial, reasonable, even admirable, yet it contains at least three flaws that are common to most such inquiries into past events. To recognize those flaws, it is necessary to understand the concept of the ‘black swan.’

A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that’s what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past.” —Nassim Nicholas Taleb, founder of a risk research and trading firm and author of Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, New York Times op-ed

Essentially, Taleb argues that things inevitably happen when you least expect them, that a dire event will always have more specificity than could have been anticipated, that negligence in not preventing an event has to be seen in comparison to “the normal rate of negligence for all possible events at the time of the tragedy — including those events that did not take place but could have”. I cautioned essentially the same thing — about the need to avoid “20/20 hindsight” — several weeks ago when the groundswell of “Bush knew!” criticism first mounted. But Taleb’s defense of the administration two weeks later appears more disingenuous, an attempt to deflect attention from the specific evidence emerging in the interim.