The hurricane study caught people’s imagination precisely because we had never thought about it before and, once we hear it, the basic idea sounds at least plausible. Unfortunately, the “hurricane name study” is a doomed research design for credibly testing what is actually a clever and even potentially useful public health hypothesis. I suggested why it was doomed from the start in my earlier post, and may elaborate more on that later.

What I want to take up here, however, is the pervasive hindsight bias that comes along with surprising findings like this. We’d never thought about the consequences of giving men’s and women’s names to hurricanes before, but, now that somebody has offered a finding that claims naming hurricanes after women actually kills people, it’s easy to get into our head this is always and naturally the direction we would have anticipated it to go.

Various stories about…