Advanced Insights on Hindsight
One of my brothers routinely mails me news articles that he finds interesting. This week, he sent a Wall Street Journal clipping about New Year’s resolutions. The story suggests that keeping them might be easier if you treat every resolution as a promise to someone you love passionately, although you’ve never met – your own “future self.”
I never finished the article, because I started daydreaming about what I would say to my future self, and whether I’d like the way he dresses, and whether Doc Brown would pull up in his DeLorean in time to save me from Biff.
But one thing I did learn is that a behavioral expert from MIT, a renowned institution of really brainy types, founded and heads a group called The Center for Advanced Hindsight.
This initially struck me as not really brainy, but rather goofy. Then I visited the Center’s website, I discovered that it is, in fact, very goofy. The Center for Advanced Hindsight is a mock think tank, created several years ago by four college professors who'd enjoyed a bit too much pizza and beer.
The Center’s mission is to expand the horizons of its members by “looking backward into the obvious” and researching what should have happened. I think I’d be quite good at this. I’m sure I could immediately contribute to a couple research projects the Center is working on, such as “The Impact of TV, Beer and Sense of Humor,” and “Predictions for the 1996 Super Bowl.”
Plus, in just a few short hours spent ignoring long-postponed household chores and surfing the internet, I learned lots of significant stuff about hindsight.
First, let’s define exactly what “hindsight” is. This explanation will do for starters: “If more women around here had hindsight, maybe they wouldn’t wear such tight pants.”
Debate that with your female friends, and then consider this: Hindsight may not be, as has so long been alleged, “20/20.” In fact, according to a motivational speaker named Fran Briggs, hindsight is at least 40/20. (For those of you who don’t understand orthopedic lingo, let’s just say 40/20 vision is amazingly acute. People blessed with it are able to see – even from 40 feet away – why my columns are so hysterically funny.)
Anyway, Fran Briggs says we learn so much from experience because we view the past even more clearly than 20/20. Fran just about had me convinced, but then I noticed her web site says that she “Looks like Oprah’s little sister,” a resemblance that I doubt even someone with 40/20 vision could detect.
Of course, I also found opinions about hindsight that oppose Fran’s. The IRS believes hindsight is often much worse than 20/20, especially when taxpayers use something called the “look-back” provision. This provision is found in Tax Code Section 460, which is coincidentally the number of years you’ll spend in prison if your look-back vision needs corrective lenses.
Still, for the most part, people seem to believe that hindsight is 20/20. In fact, there are even some web sites that use the term “infallible hindsight,” which sounds even better. An example: “Infallible hindsight confronted me with the truth that reading a map in Chinese is fraught with danger if you don’t read Chinese.” This was written by a guy who tried doing just that, and who’s serving 20/20 in a Chinese jail for trespassing. (That’s 20 days plus 20 hours every day reading Section 20 of the Tax Code.)
To assure I explored everywhere for alternate views on hindsight’s acuity, I asked Google to find “hindsight isn’t 2020.” Google promptly informed me that “hindsight isn’t 2020” couldn’t be found in a single document on the worldwide web. Looking back, I figured that would happen.
Of course, that phrase should be out in cyberspace now, thanks to this very column, which also should boost the number of links to “Center for Advanced Hindsight” from 44 to 45. I’m counting on that worldwide publicity surge to make the Center's founders eager to welcome me as a member.
It should work, as long as they’re not prejudiced by something called “Hindsight Bias.” This concept is well-illustrated by an ancient Polish proverb “Mądry Polak po szkodzi.” Translation: “I knew my wife would catch me hindsighting when that woman in tight pants walked bias.”
# # #
TakefiveT5@yahoo.com
I never finished the article, because I started daydreaming about what I would say to my future self, and whether I’d like the way he dresses, and whether Doc Brown would pull up in his DeLorean in time to save me from Biff.
But one thing I did learn is that a behavioral expert from MIT, a renowned institution of really brainy types, founded and heads a group called The Center for Advanced Hindsight.
This initially struck me as not really brainy, but rather goofy. Then I visited the Center’s website, I discovered that it is, in fact, very goofy. The Center for Advanced Hindsight is a mock think tank, created several years ago by four college professors who'd enjoyed a bit too much pizza and beer.
The Center’s mission is to expand the horizons of its members by “looking backward into the obvious” and researching what should have happened. I think I’d be quite good at this. I’m sure I could immediately contribute to a couple research projects the Center is working on, such as “The Impact of TV, Beer and Sense of Humor,” and “Predictions for the 1996 Super Bowl.”
Plus, in just a few short hours spent ignoring long-postponed household chores and surfing the internet, I learned lots of significant stuff about hindsight.
First, let’s define exactly what “hindsight” is. This explanation will do for starters: “If more women around here had hindsight, maybe they wouldn’t wear such tight pants.”
Debate that with your female friends, and then consider this: Hindsight may not be, as has so long been alleged, “20/20.” In fact, according to a motivational speaker named Fran Briggs, hindsight is at least 40/20. (For those of you who don’t understand orthopedic lingo, let’s just say 40/20 vision is amazingly acute. People blessed with it are able to see – even from 40 feet away – why my columns are so hysterically funny.)
Anyway, Fran Briggs says we learn so much from experience because we view the past even more clearly than 20/20. Fran just about had me convinced, but then I noticed her web site says that she “Looks like Oprah’s little sister,” a resemblance that I doubt even someone with 40/20 vision could detect.
Of course, I also found opinions about hindsight that oppose Fran’s. The IRS believes hindsight is often much worse than 20/20, especially when taxpayers use something called the “look-back” provision. This provision is found in Tax Code Section 460, which is coincidentally the number of years you’ll spend in prison if your look-back vision needs corrective lenses.
Still, for the most part, people seem to believe that hindsight is 20/20. In fact, there are even some web sites that use the term “infallible hindsight,” which sounds even better. An example: “Infallible hindsight confronted me with the truth that reading a map in Chinese is fraught with danger if you don’t read Chinese.” This was written by a guy who tried doing just that, and who’s serving 20/20 in a Chinese jail for trespassing. (That’s 20 days plus 20 hours every day reading Section 20 of the Tax Code.)
To assure I explored everywhere for alternate views on hindsight’s acuity, I asked Google to find “hindsight isn’t 2020.” Google promptly informed me that “hindsight isn’t 2020” couldn’t be found in a single document on the worldwide web. Looking back, I figured that would happen.
Of course, that phrase should be out in cyberspace now, thanks to this very column, which also should boost the number of links to “Center for Advanced Hindsight” from 44 to 45. I’m counting on that worldwide publicity surge to make the Center's founders eager to welcome me as a member.
It should work, as long as they’re not prejudiced by something called “Hindsight Bias.” This concept is well-illustrated by an ancient Polish proverb “Mądry Polak po szkodzi.” Translation: “I knew my wife would catch me hindsighting when that woman in tight pants walked bias.”
# # #
TakefiveT5@yahoo.com
posted by Don Stuart at 9:26 AM
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