On creeping determinism..............

     In his talk to the historians, Amos described their occupational hazard:  the tendency to take whatever facts they had observed (neglecting the many facts that they did not or could not observe) and make them fit neatly into a confident-sounding story:

          All too often, we find ourselves unable to predict what will
          happen; yet after the fact we explain what did happen with
          a great deal of confidence.  This "ability" to explain that
          which we cannot predict, even in the absence of any addi-
          tional information, represents an important, though subtle,
          flaw in our reasoning.  It leads us to believe that there is a
          less uncertain world than there actually is, and that we are
          less bright than we actually might be.  For if we can explain
          tomorrow what we cannot predict today, without any added
          information except the actual knowledge of the actual out-
          come, then this outcome must have been determined in
          advance and we should have been able to predict it.  The
          fact that we couldn't is taken as an indication of our limited
          intelligence rather than of the uncertainty that is in the world.
          All too often, we feel like kicking ourselves for failing to
          foresee that which later appears inevitable.  For all we know,
          the handwriting might have been on the wall all along.  The
          question is:  was the ink visible?

     It wasn't just sports announcers and political pundits who radically revised their narratives, or shifted focus, so that their stories seemed to fit whatever had just happened in a game or an election.  Historians imposed false order upon random events, too, probably without even realizing what they were doing.  Amos had a phrase for this.  "Creeping determinism," he called it - and jotted in his notes one of its many costs:  "He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises."

-Michael Lewis, as culled from The Undoing Project