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Comment by sullyj3 | Hacker News Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias

I recall Dan Ariely mentioning this in one of his books. His field is psychology/behavioural economics, a field where very often either outcome of an experiment can seem obvious after the fact. (Questions like Do newborn babies have an intuitive understanding of gravity?)

As I recall, he restructured his lectures, asking upfront for a show of hands as to which outcome everyone anticipated, before the big reveal. After making this change, he had fewer people approaching him after lectures saying how obvious the outcome was.

> Do newborn babies have an intuitive understanding of gravity?

I really had no idea about this one, but how it's studied is very interesting.

https://www.livescience.com/18101-infants-grasp-gravity.html

That’s interesting because much of the thesis was rooted in behavioral economics. The faculty that turned it down initially were in the economics department

Do you know which book?

It's one of the three of his books I own, I'm afraid I can't easily narrow it down further. (I own all three as audiobooks, and I recall Simon Jones reading it, but it turns out he read all three.)

• Predictably Irrational

• The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

• The Upside of Irrationality

Tangentially related I wish there were a way to “search” within audio books. Once you’ve finished the book its almost impossible to figure out where a specific chapter or passage is if you’d like to go back.

The semantic data format people have had a point all along. Just because digital audiobooks are inspired by books on cassette is no reason the data format can't support all sorts of metadata. We could have a format for written and read aloud works that highlights every word in the text on a screen as it's read when used in the proper player software, with user notations, bookmarks, indexes, an completely searchable by full text.

Kindle supports this with Whispersync. I don't know how the file format works.

They'd rather charge you separately for a DRM-locked ebook version.

I've been noticing a variant of this in myself lately. Maybe I think about some problem and stew on it and think to myself that it's probably not possible, or at least I can't come up with ideas. Then I hear that somebody else has made progress and suddenly I have a bunch of ideas. Somehow switching from "how could this work" or "can this work" to "how did they do it" leads me down entirely different paths.

I've been trying to get better at recognizing the bias and switching viewpoints without the external push.

I often think about this Michael Abrash story: (chapter introduction) http://orangeti.de/OLD/graphics_programming_black_book/html/...

When I'm stuck, or getting close to stuck, I always try to assume what I want to do has already been done in some way. Long Google searches or discussions with domain experts, purposely vague, looking for similar ideas. Even a ridiculously not-so-related paper or mention in a paper will launch me in a idea-generation frenzy and I'll quickly build confidence.

Love M. Abrash's books. Shame he didn't keep writing them, they were inspirational for me.

This is an interesting perspective that I think may exhibit itself in many domains. I’m reminded of the fact that the sub-four minute mile was impossible and then when it was first broken, many others completed the same feat in a relatively short period of time

I like the linked Egg of Columbus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus

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