What is Survivor Bias?
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A group of five people are traveling.
A: “My opinion is that this trip is excellent! I’m having a lot of fun!”
B: “My opinion is that this trip is excellent! I’m having a lot of fun!”
C: “My life is in danger. I need to get out of here immediately.”
D: “A&B are crazy and they keep creating dangerous situations.”
E: “I have no opinion about this trip. I’m here to get paid.”
**Due to the incredibly irresponsible actions of A&B, C, D, and E die.** If you do a poll in order to find out the overall opinions about the trip, the only people available are A&B, therefore, the trip they took seems like it was wonderful.
When you hear war stories that say things like “I’m the man I am now today because of my time in the military! Going to war helped separate the men from the boys and showed me what I was capable of!”, you don’t get to hear the opinions about war from the people who bled out.
You get the opinions of people who were seriously wounded and the people who were not seriously wounded, and the number of soldiers who get wounded in the service is much smaller than the number of non-wounded individuals.
It’s actually a huge problem, because the people who survived tend to end up becoming leaders in the military, and they’re biased towards combat.
This contributed to how terrible World War I was. It was the first industrial war, and the people fighting it were completely unprepared to experience a meat grinder because their leaders thought of war as a romantic adventure, where a couple of people died, there were some men maimed but survived, an army was routed, and it was all over in a season.
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