In addition to “How could I have thought that faster?”, there’s also the closely related “How could I have thought that with less information?”
It is possible to unknowingly make a mistake and later acquire new information to realize it, only to make the further meta mistake of going “well I couldn’t have known that!”
Of which it is said, “what is true was already so”. There’s a timeless perspective from which the action just is poor, in an intemporal sense, even if subjectively it was determined to be a mistake only at a specific point in time. And from this perspective one may ask: “Why now and not earlier? How could I have noticed this with less information?”
One can further dig oneself to a hole by citing outcome or hindsight bias, denying that there is a generalizable lesson to be made. But given the fact that humans are not remotely efficient in aggregating and wielding the information they possess, or that humans are computationally limited and can come to new conclusions given more time to think, I’m suspicious of such lack of updating disguised as humility.
All that said it is true that one may overfit to a particular example and indeed succumb to hindsight bias. What I claim is that “there is not much I could have done better” is a conclusion that one may arrive at after deliberate thought, not a premise one uses to reject any changes to one’s behavior.
In addition to “How could I have thought that faster?”, there’s also the closely related “How could I have thought that with less information?”
It is possible to unknowingly make a mistake and later acquire new information to realize it, only to make the further meta mistake of going “well I couldn’t have known that!”
Of which it is said, “what is true was already so”. There’s a timeless perspective from which the action just is poor, in an intemporal sense, even if subjectively it was determined to be a mistake only at a specific point in time. And from this perspective one may ask: “Why now and not earlier? How could I have noticed this with less information?”
One can further dig oneself to a hole by citing outcome or hindsight bias, denying that there is a generalizable lesson to be made. But given the fact that humans are not remotely efficient in aggregating and wielding the information they possess, or that humans are computationally limited and can come to new conclusions given more time to think, I’m suspicious of such lack of updating disguised as humility.
All that said it is true that one may overfit to a particular example and indeed succumb to hindsight bias. What I claim is that “there is not much I could have done better” is a conclusion that one may arrive at after deliberate thought, not a premise one uses to reject any changes to one’s behavior.