This is something that I have been waiting to write for quite some time now, because I am just sick of every debate going around, especially in this lockdown time. But if anything, you can take away from this, that should be this - Things always look much clearer now than then – and this is a fact and let that sink in. Let’s get into some of the things happening around.
Right now, everyone is blaming China for the ongoing pandemic. Of all the things we can blame China for, the pandemic is the last thing we can blame a country for. This is not just the common people and the even more stupider media people, but the leaders too and that’s worrying. They do have political reasons to cultivate this (You know who I am talking about...), but its deceiving. Yes, they did some shit during the pandemic, like hiding statistics and the extent of spread in their country, but here is the truth, they had nothing to do with the pandemic in itself.
As I said earlier, Things look much clearer now than then. But it’s not necessarily the truth. The creation of this kind of a mutated virus is a chance event and that’s it. Chinese consuming high amounts of “exotic” animal food just increases the probability of an event like that happening. A small thought experiment… Let’s roll back a few months. Some Bat infected with a mutated virus ate a mango and the same mango came to the market a few days after and you were unfortunate enough to buy it and that’s how the pandemic started. Would it be reasonable to point the finger at you as the cause of the pandemic let alone your country? Seems like an impossibility, it’s not. It could have happened. The thing here is hindsight clears everything up. Hindsight just obscures how the events transpired and you see only the highlights, that too with an abundance of recency bias. All this Xenophobia is just based on a lie.
Another debate I have been hearing a long time is that India could have averted the pandemic if they had stopped air travel immediately and not went to Wuhan to rescue Indian citizens stranded there. What you see now is that that resulted in certain people getting infected and hell broke loose from then on. In the hindsight, it is a decision that didn’t have the best of results, to say the least. But don’t look at the decision from now (the knowledge until today) but from the second week of February. At that point, no one exactly knew the virility and contagion of the virus. There were just around ten or fifteen thousand cases in China. But stopping the entire Air travel is an economic disaster, at least just to the airlines. These decisions are just based on a cost-benefit analysis. Stopping the entire airline makes a lot of airlines go bankrupt, which results in thousands of job losses and its effects just cascade down like crazy. At the same time, morally the right thing to do is to save our citizens who are stranded there. The government cannot leave them for dead. All this said, analyze this with the knowledge you had in the second week of February, and honestly, the leaders didn’t have a lot of information too. All of a sudden it should feel like the best decision. And even if India had made the decisions the other way around, there is no guarantee that we would not have been affected. Murphy’s law, whatever can happen, will happen.
The thing about this hindsight bias is that it is so well understood (Lots of really good books are written about it) and at the same time not a lot of us know about it. I also can confidently say that all of us are prone to hindsight bias at one point or another. And this quirk in our brain is exploited like crazy. Smart people do it intentionally (the adept leaders), dumb people do it unwittingly (the Donald Trumps of the world) and I am not sure in which camp news channels belong. It is just that a great majority of people love to hear good- but pointless- stories.
Have you ever listened closely to the rants by the opposition party leaders (I am talking about M.K. Stalin and Rahul Gandhi here) on news channels? It doesn’t get any better than that. Now that India’s GDP fell by 23%, I don’t even have to mention what’s happening.
It’s not just about politics and news. I am talking about regular everyday decisions too. Decisions should not be judged on the end result (both positive or negative), not on the information you have today, but on the information, you had on the day the decision was made. As I suggested in my earlier articles, a lot of what’s happening must be attributed to luck. Even I was criticized often for my decisions when I was running our FS team, but most of it is based on the outcomes. What I am trying to say is that hindsight criticisms (or praise for that matter) based on results are just pointless.
And it is not that hard to alleviate this cognitive bias. All you have to do is be aware of it and be vigilant. Just as simple as that. But often we choose not to do that. Because we love stories too much.
The extent to which the news channels exacerbate this cognitive bias is just not encouraging. They are making us think that their way of reasoning is really the smart way of thinking and it is absolutely not. That’s why I titled the article this way. I read this some time back. “A person can be rational, but people are just plain stupid”. We just have to think as an individual to be rational.
P.S - I am not talking about the BBCs of the world here…
A few good readings on this topic...
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
INCERTO series of books by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
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