What is Survivor Bias?
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Let’s say you want to know how to be successful at a task.
You could interview people who were successful at said to find out what they did, and this would be a valid method… but you’re potentially missing a ton of information that would only be available if you interviewed the ones who weren’t successful (for example, what did the failures do that the victors also did, and thus can’t be the determining factor of success)
Survivor Bias is the result of not looking at those failures. In some cases, it’s because you can’t look at the failures (you can’t ask a failed lion tamer what they did wrong if they were eaten), hence the name. In other cases, it’s because the failures are hard to notice. The guy who failed to get their business off the ground so they could quit their job is probably still employed at whatever job, and thus won’t be an obvious statistic to measure.
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