I hear about survivorship bias, and I hear examples like “Bill Gates dropping out of college is survivorship bias”. I don’t really know how they correlate, or how to think of things with that in mind.
In: Culture
It means that you only hear about the ones that got lucky.
If someone tells you that motorcycle helmets are overrated because he has been riding for 30 years without one and that he has never had a problem, that may be true, but all the motorcycle riders that died because they weren’t wearing a helmet are no longer around to say otherwise.
When evaluating a certain dangerous behavior you have to make sure that you don’t just pay attention to the few lucky examples that made it, but also to the ones that have perished.
Another classic example is the story of the (now) successful business owner that had to mortgage his house, max out his credit cards and borrow money from friends to keep his company going, and now he’s a millionaire. There are enough of those stories around, so people may get the impression that this is a winning strategy.
But chances are that for every success story like this, there are many more people who did the same, failed, went bankrupt and they’re now delivering pizza for a living. That’s because the media is only doing profiles on the ones that became successful, not the ones who failed.
Latest Answers