{"id":37,"date":"2023-05-04T03:38:16","date_gmt":"2023-05-04T03:38:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/micro-musings\/?p=37"},"modified":"2023-05-04T03:38:16","modified_gmt":"2023-05-04T03:38:16","slug":"survivorship-bias","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/micro-musings\/2023\/05\/survivorship-bias\/","title":{"rendered":"Survivorship Bias"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Survivorship_bias\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Survivorship_bias\" target=\"_blank\">Survivorship bias<\/a> is a subtle cognitive bias that appears more often than you might think. Places where I&#8217;ve seen it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>Joining a startup (think of early Amazon or Google employees)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Investing in a startup (what if you bought some early Microsoft shares)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Working with a new technology (when it takes off, you&#8217;ll be far ahead of everyone else)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Buying a house in a new development\/neighborhood (home value will be so high when you sell)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>None of these are wrong, and any of them might work out. But they are only focusing on the survivors. Something like 95% of all startups fail, and you can&#8217;t tell which ones will succeed before hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Comparing new cases only to the survivors from previous rounds is dangerous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Survivorship bias is a subtle cognitive bias that appears more often than you might think. Places where I&#8217;ve seen it: None of these are wrong, and any of them might work out. But they are only focusing on the survivors. Something like 95% of all startups fail, and you can&#8217;t tell which ones will succeed\u2026 <span class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/micro-musings\/2023\/05\/survivorship-bias\/\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[13,14],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/micro-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/micro-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/micro-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/micro-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/micro-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/micro-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38,"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/micro-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions\/38"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/micro-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/micro-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/micro-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}