What is Survivor Bias?
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We come to conclusions based only on what we see and not what we don’t.
For example, people say “When I was a kid, we didn’t wear seatbelts and we grew up fine!” while ignoring the fact that thousands of kids died because they weren’t wearing seatbelts when the car they were in crashed.
Or “My grandpa smoked a pack a day and lived to be 96”, while ignoring the fact that many many people who smoked died much younger…but they only see the survivor, their grandpa.
Relevant nowadays is people who say that they know many people who weren’t vaccinated and caught COVID-19 and it was no big deal…completely ignoring the number of people who died of it, but they only see the “survivors” and base conclusions on that.
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