Survivor bias
Critical thinking 💭 | Bias 💫 | #Survivor #Success #Learning
TL;DR
Survivor bias: cognitive bias that focuses on what "survived" a process, leading to skewed conclusions and flawed decisions by ignoring failures.
Success stories result from various factors, including controlled actions and luck, but the proportion varies.
Be cautious with success recipes; learn from both successful and unsuccessful examples to gain valuable insights.
Seed
Survivor bias is a cognitive bias that happens when we focus on what "survived" a selection process and overlook what did not. This can lead to skewed conclusions and flawed decision-making as we miss critical information from the failures. One of the most well-known examples of this bias is about planes returning from missions during World War Two. It is well explained, in less than 2 minutes by Derek, from the channel Veritasium, in this video.
In various contexts, like business, history, or self-improvement, survivor bias can distort our understanding of success and failure, preventing us from learning crucial lessons from the entire picture.
Most success stories result from a combination of a large number of factors. It may include elements like hard work, determination, being smart, being lucky, etc.
The aspect people often disagree about is chance.
Chance can take many forms, from being born in the right place to meeting the right person at the right time. And many people would argue that you “make your own luck”. And indeed, you can create opportunities to increase your chances of success. But there are always random factors. And no matter how proud we are about our successes, those random factors, which were beyond our control, had an impact on the outcome.
But what’s the share of pure luck vs. controlled actions leading to success? Well, it varies from one case to another. But the important point to take out of this is that if someone shares their own recipe for success, take it with a pinch of salt. No matter how successful they are, it’s very likely that they are missing an important part of the recipe somewhere.
If you want to start a business, you should look at similar successful examples for inspiration. And you should hunt for similar unsuccessful ones to learn lessons. You need to learn from the ones that failed and understand what went wrong. You need to learn from their mistakes, more than listening to why the successful ones believe they were successful. And if you also learn from the successful ones’ mistakes, then you’ve covered all the obvious angles.
At some point, we will have to discuss how to define success. That's a broad question.
Example
There are a lot of quotes from successful entrepreneurs online. For instance Steve Job’s famous “You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”.
As inspiring as it is, it is not a recipe for success. I’m sure we all can think of examples of people who followed this logic but failed.
So let’s think critically and be cautious of what we choose to believe.
Bonus
While we are talking about cognitive bias and Veriasium, here’s a fun video he made 9 years ago: The Most Common Cognitive Bias