ThirstyFish

They say hindsight is 20/20. You often feel like you "knew it all along", but did you really? It is very difficult to know whether or not you suffer from hindsight bias, because by definition it distorts your memory. Maybe hindsight is not 20/20 after all.

Hindsight might cloud insight, which in turn diminishes foresight. The same is true at a social level. Historical bias leads to the faulty evaluation of the present situation, which in turn leads to misplanning. So, when historians, journalists and analysts intentionally or unintentionally distort past historical events to fit a certain political agendas or ideologies, they are actually robbing us of our future. And that is what's happening today, in academia, in think-tanks, in the media and even among historians.

In a 1982 interview, the Jazz giant Dizzy Gillespie was asked, "What's it take to make a great trumpet player?". After a long pause, he answered: "Well, the first thing is to be a master shit detector. Detect what is valid and what is not".

Song of the Day: And Then She Stopped - Dizzy Gillespie (1965)