Survivorship Bias
xkcd.com
Survivorship Bias
1–10 of 231 posts
Re: Survivorship Bias
#2Humans just seem to be wired for cargo cult. If I make the same mistakes as the one who got unreasonably lucky, I'll end up in the same improbable spot.
Re: Survivorship Bias
#3Meta: I can't believe how often xkcd nails it.
Re: Survivorship Bias
#4Like Bo Burnham said: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q-JgG0ECp2U
Re: Survivorship Bias
#5Humans just seem to be wired for cargo cult. If I make the same mistakes as the one who got unreasonably lucky, I'll end up in the same improbable spot.
What if we humans had a predisposition to "Cargo-Cult" in order to strive to advance our race? Some sort of memetic gene. A sort of selfish gene if you will.
People would argue striving to be like a TED speaker or Kim Kardashian or (INSERT_CELEB_NAME_HERE) is superficial, dumb and shallow. Yet those people are better positioned to survive given our society doesn't change.
I would be interested to see if their was some sort of Event that drastically changed our world, would we worship hunter-gatherer style traits again?
I think yes.
Re: Survivorship Bias
#6What else would you do instead? More often than not I see this point abused by lazy or negative people to justify not doing anything useful.
Yes there's survivorship bias, you try to adjust for that, and draw inspiration from the positive parts of the better and more realistic examples.
Just because the system is rigged against you, doesn't mean you shouldn't try to achieve things. Not trying to achieve things is decidedly worse.
Re: Survivorship Bias
#7What else would you do instead? More often than not I see this point abused by lazy or negative people to justify not doing anything useful. Yes there's survivorship bias, you try to adjust for that, and draw inspiration from the positive parts of the better and more realistic examples. Just because the system is rigged against you, doesn't mean you shouldn't try to achieve things. Not trying to achieve things is dec…
I think it's more about being 'mentally prepared'. A lot of 'successful' people are harping on this thought that as long as you work hard you can accomplish something similar to what they have, which might trick a lot of people into actually believing this, not taking into account the substantial contribution 'luck' has.
In many ways, this train of thought is also abused by those who have already made it. Help the poor? Why, they're not working hard enough! Thus, helping everyone be aware of this could conceivably help us make better social policies.
Re: Survivorship Bias
#8Like Bo Burnham said: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q-JgG0ECp2U
When I saw the comic in my feeds this morning I immediately thought of Darius Kazemi's XOXO talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw
Re: Survivorship Bias
#9What else would you do instead? More often than not I see this point abused by lazy or negative people to justify not doing anything useful. Yes there's survivorship bias, you try to adjust for that, and draw inspiration from the positive parts of the better and more realistic examples. Just because the system is rigged against you, doesn't mean you shouldn't try to achieve things. Not trying to achieve things is dec…
>What else would you do instead?
Acknowledge when luck was the major reason for your success. Don't stand in front of a room of people and tell them if they weren't so damn lazy, they could have hundreds of millions of dollars as well.
In other words, if luck played any major part in your success, you really have no justification in lecturing people on how to be good at something.
Re: Survivorship Bias
#10It's indeed worth to take survivorship bias into account.
But if you put too much emphasis on survivorship bias then you would think that everything is completely random and use "survivorship bias" argument as an excuse to do nothing.
I'm highly recommend to listen Peter Thiel's speech "You are not a lottery ticket":