Four Incredibly Toxic Words: “I Told You So.”

Personal Note: I have added quite a few new subscribers today, largely thanks to Tyler Cowen graciously including my last post in his Marginal Revolution’s Sunday assorted links.

https://marginalrevolution.com

I hold myself to a 1,000 word limit per post, because while my substack is free, your time is valuable! Thanks for joining.

Very early in my career, about thirty years ago, the founder of the investment firm where I worked overheard a trader with a smirk on his face telling another trader “I told you so,” referring to a trade that hadn’t worked out.

Our founder rarely if ever raised his voice, or made threats, or lost his temper. But this time he shouted at the smirker, “If I ever hear you say, ‘I told you so again’, you won’t be working here.”

Ours was a small office back then, and most of us had heard and seen what happened. I never forgot it.  

In the context of a bad outcome, the four small words of “I told you so” are packed with an awful lot of venom.

Of course, an “I told you so” can be an affirmation of something positive.

As in “You were right; I loved that movie.”

“I told you so.” (hereinafter “ITYS”)

But even with positive events, an “ITYS” can be unhelpful, robbing someone of their own agency, their own accomplishment.

As in “Thanks for encouraging me to seek help for my addiction. It’s working”  

A reply of “ITYS” in this case is self-aggrandizing vs. a simple “I’m so happy for you.”

In the negative outcome case, often what makes an “ITYS” worse is that the process followed in reaching a decision can be absolutely correct while the outcome still turns out to be negative.

Here’s a simple example. You’re playing at the Blackjack table in Vegas. You have the biggest bet of your life on the line, and your drunk friend is looming over your shoulder blathering unsolicited advice. Your drunk friend plays Blackjack by intuition, you play by the math.

You’re dealt an eight and a six, so fourteen. The dealer’s face-up card is a six. Your friend leans over next to your face, blasts you with bourbon breath, and says “I got a huge feeling. I know a seven’s coming. Trust me on this. You should hit, in fact, you gotta hit.” Meaning ask for another card.

You know that asking for another card with fourteen against a dealer showing a six would be mathematical folly. So, you hold at fourteen. The dealer flips over his second card revealing an eight, matching your fourteen. According to the rules, the dealer must hit at anything under seventeen. He draws the next card, and it’s a seven, just as your friend predicted. Dealer has 21 against your fourteen. You lose.

Your (perhaps soon to be ex) drunk friend acts predictably.

“Dude, I told you. I can’t believe you didn’t listen. That was your seven.”

For the rest of the trip, your friend’s “ITYS”s are poured like poison in your ear, making you re-live your lost hand and your lost money, over and over.

But let’s face it. It’s really hard sometimes to resist an “ITYS.” We want to be right in our predictions and assessments, and we want acknowledgement that we were right. I’m certain I’ve broken the “ITYS” rule countless times.

Churchill and Chamberlain: A Tempting “I Told You So” Resisted

Neville Chamberlain was the chief architect of the policy of Appeasement toward Nazi Germany prior to World War Two. Appeasement reached its height in 1938 at the Munich Settlement Conference. Chamberlain believed that giving Nazi Germany the part of Czechoslovakia that was ethnically German might finally satisfy Hitler and avoid war. Obviously, Chamberlain was dead wrong.

History has judged Chamberlain severely. How could he have been so mistaken? We often forget that events in the long and well-known past were once in the unknowable future.

Perhaps like his foreign minister Lord Halifax, Chamberlain assessed the situation from a probabilistic viewpoint. Halifax was not “in favour of a certain war now, against the possibility of war, perhaps in more unfavorable circumstances later.”(1)

Winston Churchill had been consistent for a decade in his belief that Appeasement was doomed to fail. Throughout the 1930s, he was outspoken in his view that the only way to stop Hitler was to oppose Germany by force of arms, the sooner the better. And for this view, Churchill was derided as an antiquated warmonger.

After Chamberlain returned form Munich, saying he had achieved “peace with honour,” Churchill replied, “you were given the choice between war and dishouner. You chose dishounor and you will have war.”

When Hitler’s wars of aggression proved Churchill right and Chamberlain terribly wrong, Churchill replaced Chamberlain as Prime Minister in May 1940. Chamberlain died in November 1940, and Churchill gave the eulogy, a speech I love to read for its graciousness and lack of any “ITYS.”(2) Two excerpts:

In one phase [of history] men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting…The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour.”

“It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart-the love of peace…. we can be sure that Neville Chamberlain strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating struggle in which we are now engaged.”

Magic.

(1)   Quoted in A.J.P. Taylor; “The Origins of the Second World War,” p. 172

(2)   https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1940-the-finest-hour/neville-chamberlain/