What is the Survivorship Fallacy?

I saw a newspaper article about a hollywood screenwriter who was homeless before getting her big break. At first it made me think "wow, with determination, anything is possible". But then I realized that all the other homeless screenwriters probably won't be telling their failure story to the press... because they're dead.

I heard a story of a stock brokerage that want to attract more investors so they sent out emails to 51,200 people saying that a particular stock will go up in the next day, and and another email to another 51,200 people saying the stock would go down. The next day they dropped the people that with the wrong prediction, and to the same thing they did the day before with the remaining 50 thousand. At the end of 10 days of doing this they had 100 people believing the firm was run by prophets.

Without having watch the video yet... Survivorship fallacy is when you and 100 friends go pogo-sticking in a minefield. After the explosions die down and all the mines have been detonated, you're still bouncing along on your pogo stick, and you declare "pogo-sticking in a minefield is a perfectly safe activity" (Though you make this declaration to no one in particular as your 100 friends are strangely unaccounted for)

I'd say that between 2019 and 2025 there will be a lot of people who could be studied post mortem from the jabites and want to jab the co-conspirators of said jabitbaby, yet they'll be incinerated. Sad days we live in. Esp if the autopsy industry is getting paid hush money and may lose their livelihood if truth is told 😐

this is exceedingly useful, but it ought to be renamed 'The No-Autopsy Bias', the more ghoulish the name, the more famous it will become

This notion of "the arc of the universe bends toward justice" reminds me of thought I've recently had about how if you look at time from future-looking-back perspective, looking at records within records within records further and further into the past, you will see things in a purpose-oriented way (past events enable future events to happen, as this future could not happen without that past having happened first) and you will see the information-theoretic property of min-entropy, that measures complexity and diversity and general inter-connectedness, the harmonious coexistence of many things together in one whole, increasing inexorably over time (because the very process of forming records in the first place requires that to increase).

But if you instead look at time from a past-looking-forward perspective, looking at projected outcomes of projected outcomes further and further into the future, you will see things in a cause-oriented way (past events require future events to happen, as this past could not happen without that future then happening after) and you will see the information-theoretic property of max-entropy, that measures disorder and decay, increasing inexorably over time (because that property is statistically more prevalent than its negation, so on a random walk through the state space one would just expect to see it increase, i.e. odds are that it always goes up over time).

I dunno where I was going with this, other than that looking back across time it will inevitably seem like everything has lead up to this and that things get generally better over time (more complex and diverse and interconnected and harmonious), because one can only be in a position to look back across time at all from a state of the universe in which that happened. But looking forward, things continuing that way will always seem exceedingly unlikely instead. No matter where in time in what timeline you find yourself, it will always look like it's all been building up to this, but now everything is about to start falling apart.

>Be me
>Reading about the success stories of famous entrepreneurs
>Feeling inspired and motivated
>Realize I'm falling for survivorship bias
>Remember that for every successful entrepreneur, there are countless failures
>Realize that focusing only on success stories can be misleading and create unrealistic expectations
>Decide to learn from both success and failure stories to make informed decisions
>Avoiding survivorship bias like a pro

There would be fewer wars if young men were able to hear what the dead had to say about glory and heroism.

It is about the perspective, or POV, you might call that the bias. Think of it as drawing in perspective: 1. If you make a perspective grid, it will look like straight lines bend and curve. 2. If a street drawing is drawn in perspective you need to stand at the right spot/angle to see it as 3D.
So the philosophical question is: Justice is done/served if it was just. What is just?
The answer to that would most often then not lead to new questions, it's philosophy after all.
What came first the chicken or the egg?
We could use our biases on what a chicken is and what an egg is, and enter a loop - chicken lays egg > egg hatches chicken.
We could also notice the egg was not specified as chicken egg... The answer would be the egg (not as chicken egg) came before, what we now call a chicken once was a different type of bird, just how there are different types of chickens that were breed from a different type of chicken.
Also reptiles lay eggs, fish lay eggs all these creatures evolved/where created before the chicken.
POV & perspective.

Does a tree makes a sound if no one is there to hear it? Of course, you don't disappear out of existence when a blind person walks in or you are alone and nothing perceives you. Sound is made from waves, the tree falling will have/make them - perceived or not.

Although „History is written by the victors“ may explain why germans don’t believe anymore in what the NS-regime believed. This does not explain the change of what is considered to be just in a democracy.

In a free democracy, arguments have more weight then the sword. Although I don’t claim that a democracy is some kind of ideal marketplace of ideas, but violence is not what determines people’s opinions since you can not just kill everyone who disagrees.

I think the "they don't make things like they used to" is less about survivorship bias and more economic.

A toaster from say 50 years ago was pretty a far more luxury item than a base model off the Walmart shelf today.

I love this channel

Thanks for sharing. 👍

The media apparently has little, if any, interest in the psychics and prognosticators that failed to predict the "onset of a major pandemic" before 2020.

JPB

As a musician, I experience the same falacy. People argue that older music was generally better because people still listen to it, unlike some newer artists that fade away after only a few years. They don't take into account the countless artists back in the day they never heard of because people stopped listening to them after a few years as well.

It's a bias, not a fallacy. And most reasonable people take this into consideration. It is rarely as simple as stated.

P1: Simon Sinek has built a successful career as an inspirational speaker/author by capitalizing on survivorship bias.*
C: If you identify keys to success identified through survivorship bias, you will sell a lot of inspirational books. 😁

* e.g., his Ted Talk about why the Wright Brothers were successful when so many others tried unsuccessfully to build a flying machine.