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Just before Trump was elected, Scott wrote a great piece called Tuesday shouldn't change the narrative. In it he talks about how the race between Trump and Hillary was very close, close enough that random fluctuations in opinion or random events like the weather could be the deciding factor in the race. He argues that people shouldn't change their worldview based on whatever the outcome is. I believe I see so many people falling into this trap though. It didn't take long after Trump won for people on all sides to start talking as if it was always inevitable, like "Trump won because he inspired people more and riled up his base, Clinton was an uninspiring candidate playing too safe" or "Trump's victory was inevitable because of the deep history of racism in the country", etc. I feel like (though I'm not sure I can think of examples off the top of my head) even Scott might fall into this trap a little bit.
People even took the victory as an indictment of MSM, since most sources said that Trump had something like a 1% chance of winning. I believe this is illogical, though, because even if he did have a 1% chance of winning, it could have been that 1% chance that caused him to win. It's not like whoever has the highest percent chance at the time of the election is declared the winner.
I'm just curious to hear people's thoughts on this, both about this pattern of thought of erroneously retroactively changing worldviews or thinking events were inevitable, as well as about the 2016 election. I think that Scott's article has a good lesson, and it'd do most people good to try to remember it more, before taking the events which have transpired as an indication that only those events could have ever transpired.
For retroactively changing worldviews, this I think is something very common in general life. My guess would be that people really think in narratives and stories. This is how humans make sense of the world, it is hard to keep track of myriads of possible worlds that could be spawned by butterfly flapping its wings somewhere in Amazon rainforest. One other area where I see it all the time is sports. You can have a great player who is MVP for five years and then if he bombs for a season you will see plethora of I knew he always sucked comments. Similarly people are also prone to overhype especially new players calling them GOAT after one season already having a narrative in their heads. In fact it often is these very same supposed fans who come hard on that player if he bombs, or even if he does something outside of the game that offends fans.
I remember one analysis of this fact mentioning that fans often project their own emotions and insecurities onto the player developing a strange parasocial relationship. If the player do well they have a kick of dopamine themselves, if the player does badly they can really get down. Inventing certain narratives especially those that externalize this pain can then serves as methods of dealing with cognitive dissonance for people. Inventing stories out of the whole cloth reduces inpredictability and thus anxiety and stress. Another one of those examples is centered around "Just World" fallacy - you have to have control over the world so if something bad happen it feels psychologically good to invent some reasons for that. Oh, she got harassed because she wore suggestive cloths/all men are pigs.
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