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historians_fallacy
The fallacy of assuming that historical decision-makers had access to the same information available to those analyzing the decision after the fact. It evaluates past actions using present knowledge, which produces unfair and misleading judgments.
The government should have known the levees would fail. All the data showed it was inevitable. (But that data was scattered and not compiled until after the disaster.)
How could the generals not have known the Normandy landing would succeed? It's obvious from the maps that the plan was sound. (Ignoring that the outcome was deeply uncertain at the time and could easily have failed.)
Those 1990s doctors were negligent for not catching his cancer early — the symptoms are textbook. (Overlooking that the diagnostic criteria and imaging technology used to identify them only became standard years later.)
Binary (yes/no) questions an LLM must answer to identify this aspect:
Does the argument judge a past decision or action?
Type: binaryDoes it assume the decision-maker had access to information that was only available in hindsight?
Type: binaryDoes the evaluation change significantly when limited to only the information available at the time?
Type: binaryThe fallacy of assuming that historical decision-makers had access to the same information available to those analyzing the decision after the fact. It evaluates past actions using present knowledge, which produces unfair and misleading judgments.
Once we know the outcome, all the warning signs seem obvious. Hindsight compresses the uncertainty that existed at the time into a misleadingly clear narrative.
Ask what information was actually available to the decision-maker at the time, and evaluate the decision based only on that information.
Military history analysis, post-crisis financial regulation debates, and legal malpractice cases.
Use these tools to detect, analyze, or train this aspect.