retrospective distortion
You can read a text, but you don’t get any sense of the infinity of choices that were made in that text until you start trying to reproduce it.
how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror
history seems clearer and more organized in history books than in empirical reality
School repels fine minds by stripping math of cultural context and leaving only a skeleton of technicalities
The researchers then asked the women their reasons for their choices. Texture, “feel,” and color featured among the selected reasons. All the pairs of stockings were, in fact, identical. The women supplied backfit, post hoc explanations.