What is hindsight bias?

Hindsight bias is a concept in personal epistemology: Record not just what you decided but why — because your future self will rewrite the reasoning after the fact, and you will never notice it happening.

Example: You choose to turn down a promising job offer because you value stability for your family right now. Six months later, the company you stayed at announces layoffs. You tell yourself you 'always had a bad feeling about staying.' But your decision journal says otherwise — you stayed deliberately, for specific reasons, under specific constraints. Without that record, you would have rewritten your own decision history and learned nothing from a choice that was actually well-reasoned.

This concept is part of Phase 3 (Capture Systems) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for capture systems.