It is common and tempting fallacy to view the later steps in a mathematical evolution as much more obvious and cogent after the fact than they were beforehand.--Von Neumann (1953) [HT Hülya Eraslan]
In the midst of a priority dispute over the theory of games, Von Neumann states an important truth that generalizes to the writing of history tout court. When one tries to understand what the past looked like to agents, one must guard against hindsight bias.
Even so, we should pause at Von Neumann's "much more obvious and cogent." This implies that the path ahead may well be somewhat obvious and cogent. Obviousness and cogency are terms that convey epistemic states of agents more than ontological states of the (mathematical) target system. Unfortunately, not even all expert, epistemic agents are equal in skill. (From Von Neumann's perspective this is so obvious that he rests his priority claim, in part, on it.) To put the nub in chess-playing terms: sometimes the international grand master really sees the path ahead where the national master just sees vague contours.
The problem in writing the history of intellectually challenging disciplines, is that generally the agents we write about are more skilled than we are in the topic; so it is likely that while we are correctly guarding against hindsight bias, we may miss implications, mathematical and conceptual, that may well have been more obvious and cogent to them. For sometimes they only write down the obvious, when there is a need to make the case (say, in order to establish priority).
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