Sherman’s law of prior knowledge, or, predicting the past

“When a disaster happens, large or small, there is a 100% chance that a headline will be written claiming ignored warnings.”

I’ve come to realize, that’s the narrative. It’s always the narrative, and the details of the incident matter little.

Apple Engineer Told Jobs IPhone Antenna Might Cut Calls

…etc. It’s not that any of these folks are blameless. It’s that, in all likelihood, they acted like you and I and everyone else would.

And we (they) have to. If we responded to everything that might be a disaster, we’d never leave the house. Did you read every street sign, every warning label today? Every word of every email you were sent?

Your life is full of possible disasters. It’s just that 99.9% of them won’t come to pass, and your only choice is to make the best of incomplete information. Remember, useless panic and irrational caution have costs.

After the fact, however, we need a story. It’s called the narrative fallacy. If we can imagine incompetent people taking reckless chances, then disasters start to make sense.

But making sense is not something that most disasters do. Which is called the ludic fallacy — that probabilities tell us something, and that these things in the past were predictable.

And yet that assertion is self-refuting. Why? Because we didn’t predict it.

Sure, someone did. But you’ll only find out who in retrospect.