Survivorship Bias: Coming Soon
Survivorship Bias will aim to take an unblinking, warts-and-all view of performance and process. To balance the survivorship bias inherent in our media and storytelling diet, and show the grind as it truly is.
During World War II, Allied forces were losing bombers to enemy fire. The military had to strategically add reinforcement plates, but they had to pick the places they would reinforce judiciously, in order to make sure the bombers weren't too heavy to fly.
The U.S. military brought in analysts to study the planes after they returned from battle. They determined that the wings, fuselage, and tail would require reinforcement plates, because this was where they found bullet holes.
However, Abraham Wald spotted the survivorship bias in their analysis: they were only studying the planes that returned. Because there were no holes in the engines, the cockpit, and the fuel system, these were in fact the areas where a bullet hit was fatal.
The very data they were using pointed to the opposite conclusion they had reached.
This is the deadly risk of allowing survivorship bias to creep in.
Today, we love to study the successes in business, sports, science, art, and politics. The unicorn startups, the hall-of-famers, and the Nobel winners.
But those are the survivors. The ones who made it back.
We too rarely ask: what happened to the others?
The ones who took a deadly hit to the engine...
My new series, Survivorship Bias, will aim to take an unblinking, warts-and-all view of performance and process. To balance the survivorship bias inherent in our media and storytelling diet, and show the grind as it truly is.
Coming 2025. Sign up to be notified.