71–79 of 79 posts
Survivorship bias: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Would you mind fleshing that out? Just posting two words and linking to wikipedia doesn't add much to the conversation, and people who care about maintaining the level of discourse on HN might heavily downvote you.
You must be careful when applying this sort of logic because it assumes that what happens to a plane after its shot is entirely deterministic, ie. if it gets shot in the tail fin it crashes, if it gets shot in the wing it doesn't. That may or may be accurate for planes (I really don't know) but may not for other things. Suppose anywhere the plane was shot led to a 1/5 chance of the plane crashing, meaning that all pl…
Suppose anywhere the plane was shot led to a 1/5 chance of the plane crashing, meaning that all places are equally deserving of armor. Suppose also that the wings comprised about 75% of the surface area of the plane. You'd see 3 planes returning with bullet holes in a wing for every 1 with a bullet hole somewhere else. So do your study with the plane divided up into equal-sized sections. Or look for clustering and di…
On the other hand, if the enemy had extremely accurate guns and (say, for visibility reasons) always shot at and hit particular parts of the plane (say, the parts of the wings next to the necessarily shiny propellers) then the naive reasoning would be correct: the areas that were bullet-ridden on returning planes would be the ones that should be armored.
> count up all the bullet holes in various places, and then put extra armor in the areas that attracted the most fire. > > Obvious but wrong Please tell me I'm not the only one who instantly thought, obviously wrong. And thought the obvious solution is look at what got shot down (or similar such as the article listed) Really? Are most people this illogical?
It's not completely illogical to want to protect the places with holes, because the distribution of where bullets hit isn't random. Fighter pilots aimed at specific parts of planes they were attacking. And some surfaces would have been protected either by other surfaces or by having a nearly flat angle of incidence to probable incoming fire.
Reminds me of common belief that dolphins push drowning people to the shore. It's hard to check if it's actually true, after all, most people pushed in opposite direction are most likely dead.
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WW II fighter pilots were very rational about what they aimed at. (I happen to have read a lot about this.)
Was this because of their incredibly short ammunition reserves? I heard something recently about spitfires having only having about 20s worth of machine gun fire.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
The only black swan connection I see is Taleb's point about "the graveyard of silent evidence". Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We didn't see all the planes returning that had catastrophic failures in the known bullet-holed areas and never returned.
I think Eliezer Yudkowsky strongly disagrees - http://lesswrong.com/lw/ih/absence_of_evidence_is_evidence_o...
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According to John Forester, being struck by an overtaking car is among the least likely bicycle accidents, even though it is the rationale used to justify mandatory bike lane usage. http://www.johnforester.com/ His book, Effective Cycling is a great way to improve bicycle safety.
His book is a mixed bag. His thoughts about how to ride are good, but his conclusion in favor of wide curbside lanes and against bike lanes did lots of damage, as many locales/planners used his book as justification for not putting in bike lanes. This thinking was difficult to unwind. Of course bike lane use shouldn't be mandatory, as they aren't in California at least. I don't know any cyclists here who aren't grate…
While I appreciate that some people favor bike lanes, in my experience riding in the traffic lane as a vehicle is safer than accepting secondary status in a separate lane. And the technique is not dependent on infrastructure...and saying, "But California does it," won't help the cause in most places. [I bought the book about 20 years ago, recently returned to it now that I'm teaching my son to ride]
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Do you have any citations for that? I'm not doubting you, but genuinely curious (and ambivalent about helmets). There seems to be a pervasive attitude in the US that if you're a cyclist hit by a car when you're not wearing a helmet, you're automatically at fault, because you're not being responsible. Which is weird, because the risk isn't coming from the bikes...and there's a good chance that it makes cycling seem mo…
Can't remember the name but an experiment by a prof from UCL showed that cars approached him more closely when he was wearing a helmet - but they gave him more space when he was wearing a long blonde wig. So the safest solution is a transvestite without a helmet.
> research has shown that cars drive closer to people with helmets than they do to people without them
I've taken to just assuming any surprising result from sociology is bullshit unless I really trust the source or have thoroughly investigated the methodology.
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For bombers thats the main cause of aircraft losses, fighters of WWII were pretty ineffective, especially at night. It's difficult to believe a WWII era fighter diving into a stream of bombers, at night, while the multiple gun turrets on 100s of bombers were returning fire - were making precise tactical decision about which part of the airframe to target. The nice thing (statistically) about AA fire is that it's rath…
The RAF didn't fly in formation during night bombing attacks, rather they flew in "streams" often hundreds of miles long. So there wouldn't have been hundreds of turrets to bring to bear on a single fighter. I think you're also overestimating how easy it would be to spot a blacked out fighter at night. A popular german night fighter tactic was often to sneak up beneath a bomber and then pitch the nose of the fighter…
And in Wald's research a night fighter still had some difficulty finding and approaching abomber even with ground radar - so they fired at it (using proximty fuses or upward firing guns) essentially at random points - there was no statsistical bias of the fighter pilot targetting specific systems