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Everything Everywhere Daily

Survivorship Bias

Everything Everywhere Daily

Gary Arndt | Glassbox Media

History, Education

4.81.8K Ratings

🗓️ 27 September 2021

⏱️ 10 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

During World War II, the US Army assigned statistician Abraham Wald the task of statistically figuring out where extra armor should be added to American bombers. After analyzing the evidence and sharing it with the Army, he recommended the exact opposite of what the Army assumed. The reason was that the Army had engaged in a logical fallacy. Learn more about survivorship bias and how it manifests itself into everyday thinking, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

During World War II, the US Army assigned statistician Abraham Wald to the task of statistically figuring out where extra armor should be added to American bombers.

0:09.0

After analyzing the evidence and sharing it with the army he recommended the exact opposite

0:14.5

of what the army assumed the reason was that the army had engaged in a logical

0:18.8

fallacy learn more about survivorship bias and how it manifests itself into everyday thinking

0:24.0

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. This episode is sponsored by Scotty Vest.

0:38.0

This episode is sponsored by Scotty Vest.

0:40.0

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0:49.6

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0:55.2

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0:59.6

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1:04.5

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1:07.6

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1:26.1

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1:30.3

Let's start this discussion with the definition of survivor bias. The simple

1:35.6

definition is that it's considered a logical fallacy or statistical error or a

1:39.4

cognitive shortcut where you don't look at an entire population when making an inference because some part of the population didn't meet certain criteria.

1:48.0

The classic example which illustrates the point is the example that I mentioned in the introduction. In World War II, the Army Air Corps the

1:55.0

point is the example that I mentioned in the introduction.

1:53.0

In World War II, the Army Air Corps wanted to provide additional armor to their bombers that were flying missions over Germany.

...

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