05 — Cognitive Biases

Hindsight Bias#

◐ Behavioral
◆ The Pattern"I knew it all along.

Hindsight bias — "I knew it all along." After an outcome, people believe they predicted it.

The damage:
1. Prevents learning — if you "knew," there's nothing to improve
2. Creates overconfidence in future predictions
3. Makes past decisions look obvious when they weren't
4. Leads to unfair self-criticism ("how could I miss that?")

Fix: Keep a decision journal. Record your reasoning before the outcome. Compare predictions to results. Humbling — and educational.

Pattern bridge: Believing you knew it all along is overfitting to the training set — perfect past fit, no future predictive power. In statistics, p-hacking manufactures the same false certainty.
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