Can Foresight be 20/20?
Looking ahead may be more accurate than looking backward.
Conventional wisdom tells us hindsight is 20/20 and suggests that valuable insight comes from looking backward, aka being a “Monday-morning quarterback.” Although we can’t change the initial outcome, the idea is that we can make better decisions in the future based on analyzing past action or performance.
Makes sense, which is why it’s considered conventional wisdom. However, since I am anything but conventional, I started to wonder… is hindsight really revelatory? Are our retro glances even accurate?
Certainly if you’ve ever reminisced with someone about a shared past occurrence, you’ve experienced a variation in how an event is remembered. Sometimes the memories are so different, you might have wondered if that other person was actually there.
So let’s take an event that’s been captured on camera, or videotape, such as a sports event. Surely, that’s an accurate account of what happened, right? Well, why does it take a panel of judges or referees a seemingly ridiculous length of time to review a play via the replays on camera? Very often, a decision made based on the view of the event from one camera is challenged after a review of the same play from a different camera.
