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Hindsight Devalues Science — LessWrong

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This essay is closely based on an excerpt from Meyers’s Exploring Social Psychology; the excerpt is worth reading in its entirety. Cullen Murphy, editor of The Atlantic, said that the social sciences turn up “no ideas or conclusions that can’t be found in [any] encyclopedia of quotations . . . Day after day social scientists go out into the world. Day after day they discover that people’s behavior is pretty much what you’d expect.” Of course, the “expectation” is all hindsight. (Hindsight bias: Subjects who know the actual answer to a question assign much higher probabilities they “would have” guessed for that answer, compared to subjects who must guess without knowing the answer.) The historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. dismissed scientific studies of World War II soldiers’ experiences as “ponderous demonstrations” of common sense. For example: How many of these findings do you think you could have predicted in advance? Three out of five? Four out of five? Are there any cases where you

x Hindsight Devalues Science — LessWrong Noticing Confusion Hindsight Bias Fallacies Heuristics & Biases Frontpage 274 Hindsight Devalues Science by Eliezer Yudkowsky 17th Aug 2007 2 min read 44 274 This essay is closely based on an excerpt from Meyers’s Exploring Social Psychology ; the excerpt is worth reading in its entirety. Cullen Murphy, editor of The Atlantic , said that the social sciences turn up “no ideas or conclusions that can’t be found in [any] encyclopedia of quotations . . . Day after day social scientists go out into the world. Day after day they discover that people’s behavio

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