What is Survivor Bias?
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Survivorship bias means you only look at successful participants when evaluating an entire group.
Example 1: Justin Bieber started a Youtube channel, posted videos of himself singing, got discovered, and became a millionaire pop star. By only examining the results of Justin Bieber, the “survivor,” it would appear that making it big in the music industry just requires starting a Youtube channel.
When you remove the bias and examine the hundreds of thousands (or millions) of aspiring musicians who created a Youtube channel, you see that the rate of success is extremely low.
Survivorship bias ignores most (or all) of the failures in a group and only focuses on the information about the individuals that succeeded, leading to incorrect conclusions.
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