Hindsight and delusional clarity

Putting the final touches on my second auditing paper, and writing (briefly) about the clear light of hindsight, outcome bias and counterfactual logics.

I’ve read a lot about these concepts, but just came across this different way to describe the misleading influence of hindsight – “delusional clarity”.

That is, “Progressively working backwards through a causal framework with a known outcome runs the risk of delusional clarity” (pg. ii46, bold added).

Not much to say except I found it a pretty apt way to describe the sense of misplaced clarity, meaning or control obtained in hindsight; a perfect term for my paper.

I know it’s not new – the quoted paper was from 2003 and a quick search brings up other papers that have used the term, but I hadn’t run into it before.

Ref: Henriksen, K., & Kaplan, H. (2003). Hindsight bias, outcome knowledge and adaptive learning. BMJ Quality & Safety, 12(suppl 2), ii46-ii50.

Link to the LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/benhutchinson2_putting-the-final-touches-on-my-second-auditing-activity-7078133633420578816-cCIP?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

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