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
Survivorship bias is coming to conclusions based on what limited data survived or only on examples of people who succeeded.
If you look at a collection of arrowheads you would think that every arrowhead was made from stone, but the dominance of stone arrowheads in our collections isn’t due to stone arrowheads being the only type. There are a few examples of wooden arrowheads but wood decays over time so very few have *survived* for us to find.
For things like “these traits make people successful” they often list traits that successful people have as though those traits are what lead to the success, but that ignores that there are far more people with those traits who have failed. The vast majority of new businesses will fail within 5 years, and those that survive may have done something right but are more likely to have just been lucky. If you look at a bunch of lucky samples and try to find a trend you’ll draw bad conclusions because you’ve ignored the identical samples that didn’t turn out the same and aren’t around for you to study.
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