> [!tldr] **Survivor Bias** is when you look at things that were successful and try to draw clean lines between them to figure out patterns that lead to success, but **fail to account for things that did not work out**. The quintessential example here is the idea of the planes that got shot up and returned to base, leading to the air force to think they needed to reinforce those parts of the plane - when in actuality it was the *other* parts of the plane that needed reinforcing. If the plane made it back to base, clearly it was able to sustain damage there and survive. This (I think, at least) is also applicable to any case where you look at the [[ends]] of what was *successful* without properly considering the ends of those things that were *not* successful. A potential example of this from my own notes[^1] is how [[Almost every runaway success I've ever had was centered on something simple.]] I'm quite aware that a lot of things that fully flopped and failed also could have been described as "centering on something simple". Maybe this is related to what Malcolm Gladwell called the "[[Stickiness Factor]]". Things that went well *that I can think of a simple statement to describe* became simple in my mind... when maybe they weren't actually so simple. **** # More ## Source - I forget where I learned about this originally, I'm writing from my brain though [^1]: which I'm actually writing at the exact same time as this, because I'm considering both things at once. Makes me feel smart, I guess.