Malcolm Gladwell in his best selling book “What the dog saw” has a chapter called “Connecting the dots”. This chapter talks about human phenomena called “Creeping Determinism”. Creeping determinism is the sense that grows on us, in retrospect, that what has happened was actually inevitable — and the chief effect of creeping determinism is that it turns unexpected events into expected events.
In Connecting the dots — Gladwell talks about how Israel failed to prevent an attack by Syria and Egypt on Israels territory in October 1973. Israel got many leads and ground reports of troop movement by Egypt and Syria yet it failed to act. Israel being a small country preparing for war meant it had to mobilise its citizens army which means disrupting the country’s economy and being disruptive. And in between Jan 1973 — Oct 1973, Egypt mobilised its army nineteen times without going to war. So Israel failed to connect the dots and got attacked.
Gladwell also talks extensively about 9/11 attacks on US and how US intelligence failed to connect the dots, even though they had sufficient leads on the eminent attack going to happen. In fact the book quotes some bone chilling phone transcripts between two Al Qaeda operatives in Aug 2001 about the planned attack.
“I’ve been studying airplanes” al Hilal tells Es Sayed
“If God wills, I hope to be able to bring you a window or piece of plan the next time I see you”
“What is there a jihad planned?” Es Sayed asked
“In the future, listen to the news and remember these words ‘Up above’” al Hilal replies
Still US couldn’t predict or prevent the attack. When operating out in real life there is lot of ambiguity, noises and too much randomness. And it is a gargantuan task to separate signal from noise.
Now let us talk about India’s covid journey. When epidemic set its foot in India in March 2020, looking how Europe and US were battered experts were predicting crumbling of Indian health system, millions of deaths, lack of ventilators, overflowing mortuaries etc. The fear the “so-called” experts set out was palpable and Government erred on the side of caution with strict lockdowns. Well epidemic came, but didn’t wreak havoc and was fizzling out fast. Our casualty rates were low and we lowered the guards once the initial wave tapered off.
Fast forward to April 2021, India is in the grip of 2nd wave where the infection is more contagious but still our mortality rates are low. There are reports of overflowing hospitals, ICUs, ventilators, lack of oxygen etc. But I believe we will overcome this situation in next 4–5 weeks.
Now our eminent journalists are coming out with hindsight reports holding mirror to Modi, rebuking Kumbh mela, BJP election campaigns etc. Shekhar Gupta starts a #WhatWentWrong series from his team on what went wrong on handling Covid 2nd wave by Central Government in his magazine The Print.
Let’s not be carried by these bombastic op-eds. These are just instances of our journalists getting swept away by Hindsight Biases or Creeping Determinism in their over zealousness to paint themselves as messiahs of world problems. One should realise that these flowery pieces always appear after the fact and makes the tone “I told you so” as if they had all the pieces of puzzle solved and template solution ready made available before the actual event happened.
Look at the follow contradictions coming out from the same person
And else where there is appreciation for the rollout and implementation of the vaccination process itself
If vaccines are de-centralized and left to highest bidder among the states, let it not be a fallacy that an enterprising state like Gujarat may outbid and gobble up the entire initial lot of vaccines. Then our hindsight journalists would morph themselves as communists speaking of basic human right for vaccine.
In his latest holding mirror piece Shekhar Gupta advocates putting more vaccines into arms, but these were the same journalist who questioned so-called hasty approval of vaccination
Thanks to Malcolm Gladwell for his enriching book which enlightened me on Hindsight Biases/Creeping Determinism and I am seeing a very practical demonstration of this behaviour by our journalists. These coterie of elitists not only exhibit such biases but also change their hindsights to suit their agenda. Let us not despise them, they are doing their job, unless they hold themselves in high apostles opposing the establishments they can’t deliver sermons like this, isn’t it?
But let’s also not forget outside situations is too much unpredictable, there is too much randomness affecting the course of events and given the ever changing scenarios (like virus mutations, spreading through air etc.) there is no template solution to fix this, we need an able leadership which can take the onus and act without compromising on integrity, which I believe the current Government is doing its best.
To conclude let us remind our elitist coterie, soothsayers and doomsday predictors word from Malcolm Gladwell himself —
“In our zeal to find out what went wrong, how it can be fixed, and upon whom blame should be placed, remember the lesson of creeping determinism: what seems obvious now may not always have been so clear.”
And your predictions of the future are always going to be clouded & obscured by Randomness especially for topics like virus outbreak where scientific community themselves are changing and evolving their learnings.
