{"id":427,"date":"2026-05-16T18:37:49","date_gmt":"2026-05-16T15:37:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/keremgurevin.com\/?p=427"},"modified":"2026-05-16T18:56:06","modified_gmt":"2026-05-16T15:56:06","slug":"survivorship-bias-know-your-weaknesses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/keremgurevin.com\/?p=427","title":{"rendered":"Survivorship Bias – Know Your Weaknesses"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On the brink of World War II, the U.S. military was analyzing returning bombers to see where they took the most damage. Hoping to reinforce the planes, they noticed heavy shielding was needed on the wings and fuselage<\/a>. Sounds logical, right? You armor the places where planes have been hit in order to keep the bombers from going down. That was the military’s plan. Until statistician Abraham Wald<\/a> pointed out a fatal flaw:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They were only looking at the survivors<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The planes that shot down didn’t make it back to be analyzed. The armor actually needed to go where the returning planes hadn’t<\/em> been hit: the engines and cockpit. If a plane took fire there, it crashed.<\/p>\n\n\n

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This is survivorship bias: a trick our brains play where we focus on successful outcomes while completely ignoring the failures that dropped out of the equation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It triggers a classic logical fallacy famously mocked by Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory<\/em><\/a>: Post hoc ergo propter hoc<\/em><\/strong>\u2014”after this, therefore because of this.” We see a billionaire who dropped out of college and assume the dropout itself caused the billions. We mistake a mere sequence of events, or pure luck, for a brilliant strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The consequences of this blind spot are not to be dismissed. In the world of business, we study “habits of highly successful startups” while ignoring the thousands if not millions of bankrupt companies that perhaps followed the exact same blueprint but were just not lucky enough. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only studying the winners and completely disregarding the ones who failed causes us to mistake luck for strategy, correlation for causation, and anomalies for advice. We construct a skewed reality built on incomplete data. To make truly informed decisions, we have to look past the visible, celebrated survivors. We should actively seek out the missing stories, digging into the data left behind in the graveyard of failure to see the full picture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In conclusion, one must always keep in mind that failure coexists alongside success. We should always make sure we have a full grasp on the subject before making a decision. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the brink of World War II, the U.S. military was analyzing returning bombers to see where they took the most damage. Hoping to reinforce the planes, they noticed heavy shielding was needed on the wings and fuselage. Sounds logical, right? You armor the places where planes have been hit in order to keep the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":2,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/keremgurevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/keremgurevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/keremgurevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keremgurevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keremgurevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=427"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/keremgurevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":436,"href":"https:\/\/keremgurevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427\/revisions\/436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/keremgurevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keremgurevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keremgurevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}