Home

May
2013

23

About/Contact

All Posts

Books

Merch

Podcast

Survivorship Bias

The Misconception: You should focus on the successful if you wish to

become successful.
The Truth: When failure becomes invisible, the difference between failure
and success may also become invisible.

TOP POSTS

Survivorship Bias
All Posts

The Benjamin Franklin

Effect
Procrastination
Confirmation Bias
The Backfire Effect
YANSS Podcast - Episode
Six
Books
Learned Helplessness
Deindividuation
Get new posts by email

Follow via Email

You Are Not So Smart
Like

Illustration by Brad Clark at http://www.plus3video.com

In New York City, in an apartment a few streets away from the center of
Harlem, above trees reaching out over sidewalks and dogs pulling at
leashes and conversations cut short to avoid parking tickets, a group of
professional thinkers once gathered and completed equations that would
both snuff and spare several hundred thousand human lives.
People walking by the apartment at the time had no idea that four stories
above them some of the most important work in applied mathematics was
tilting the scales of a global conflict as secret agents of the United States
armed forces, arithmetical soldiers, engaged in statistical combat. Nor
could people today know as they open umbrellas and twist heels on
cigarettes, that nearby, in an apartment overlooking Morningside Heights,
one of those soldiers once effortlessly prevented the United States military
from doing something incredibly stupid, something that could have
changed the flags now flying in capitals around the world had he not caught
it, something you do every day.

22,203

These masters of math moved their families across the country, some
across an ocean, so they could work together. As they unpacked, the
theaters in their new hometowns replaced posters for Citizen Kane with
those for Casablanca, and the newspapers they unwrapped from photo
frames and plates featured stories still unravelling the events at Pearl
Harbor. Many still held positions at universities. Others left those sorts of
jobs to think deeply in one of the many groups that worked for the armed
forces, free of any other obligations aside from checking in on their
families at night and feeding their brains during the day. All paused their
careers and rushed to enlist so they could help crush Hitler, not with guns
and brawn, but with integers and exponents.
The official name for the people inside the apartment was the Statistical
Research Group, a cabal of geniuses assembled at the request of the
White House and made up of people who would go on to compete for and
win Nobel Prizes. The SRG was an extension of Columbia University, and
they dealt mainly with statistical analysis. The Philadelphia Computing
Section, made up entirely of women mathematicians, worked six days a
week at the University of Pennsylvania on ballistics tables. Other groups
with different specialties were tied to Harvard, Princeton, Brown and
others, 11 in all, each a leaf at the end of a new branch of the government
created to help defeat the Axis the Department of War Math.
Actuallyno. They were never officially known by such a deliciously sexy
title. They were instead called the Applied Mathematics Panel, but they
operated as if they were a department of war math.
The Department, ahem, the Panel, was created because the United States
needed help. A surge of new technology had flooded into daily life, and the
same wonders that years earlier drove ticket sales to the Worlds Fair were
now cracking open cities. Numbers and variables now massed into
scenarios far too complex to solve with maps and binoculars. The military
realized it faced problems that no soldier had ever confronted. No best
practices yet existed for things like rockets and radar stations and aircraft
carriers. The most advanced computational devices available were clunky
experiments made of telephone switches or vacuum tubes. A calculator still
looked like the mutant child of an old-fashioned cash register and a
mechanical typewriter. If you wanted solutions to the newly unfathomable
problems of modern combat you needed powerful number crunchers, and
in 1941 the worlds most powerful number crunchers ran on toast and
coffee.
Here is how it worked: Somewhere inside the vast machinery of war a
commander would stumble into a problem. That commander would then
send a request to the head of the Panel who would then assign the task to
the group he thought would best be able to resolve the issue. Scientists in
that group would then travel to Washington and meet with with top military
personnel and advisors and explain to them how they might go about
solving the problem. It was like calling technical support, except you called
a computational genius who then invented a new way of understanding the
world through math in an effort to win a global conflict for control of the
planet.

For instance, the

Navy desperately
needed to know
what was the best
possible pattern,
or spread, of
torpedoes to
launch against
large enemy
ships. All they had
to go on were a
series of hastily
taken, blurry,
black-and-white
photographs of
turning Japanese
war vessels. The
Panel handed
over the photos to
one of its meatbased mainframes
and asked them to
report back when
it had a solution.
The warrior
Illustration by Brad Clark at
mathematicians
http://www.plus3video.com/
solved the
problem almost as soon as they saw it. Lord Kelvin, they told the Navy, had
already worked out the calculations in 1887. Just look at the patterns in the
waves, they explained, see how they fan out in curves like an unfurling
fern? The spaces tell you everything; they give it all away. Work out the
distance between the cusps of the bow waves and youll know how fast the
ship is going. Lord Kelvin hadnt worked out what to do if the ship was
turning, but no problem, they said. The mathematicians scribbled on
notepads and clacked on blackboards until they had both advanced the
field and created a solution. They then measured wavelets on real ships
and saw their math was sound. The Navy added a new weapon to its
arsenal the ability to accurately send a barrage of torpedoes into a
turning ship based only on what you could divine from the patterns in the
waves.
The devotion of the mathematical soldiers grew stronger as the war grew
bloodier and they learned the things they etched on hidden blackboards
and jotted on guarded scraps of paper determined who would and would
not return home to their families once the war was over. Leading brains in
every scientific discipline had eagerly joined the fight, and although
textbooks would eventually devote chapters to the work of the
codebreakers and the creators of the atomic bomb, there were many
groups whose stories never made headlines that produced nothing more
than weaponized equations. One story in particular was nearly lost forever.
In it, a brilliant statistician named Abraham Wald saved countless lives by
preventing a group of military commanders from committing a common
human error, a mistake that you probably make every single day.

Colleagues described Wald as gentle and kind, and as a genius

unsurpassed in his areas of expertise. His contributions, said one peer, had
produced a decisive turn in method and purpose in the social sciences.
Born in a Hungary in 1902 on a parcel of land later claimed by Romania, the
son of a Jewish baker, Wald spent his childhood studying equations,
eventually working his way up through academia to become a graduate
student at the University of Vienna mentored by the great mathematician
Karl Menger. He was the sort of student who offered suggestions on how
to improve the books he was reading, and then saw to it those suggestions
were incorporated into later editions. His mentor would introduce Wald to
problems that made experts in the field rub their beards, the sort of things
with names like stochastic difference equations and the betweenness
among the ternary relations in metric space. Wald would not only return
within a month or so with the solution to such a problem but politely ask for
another to solve. As he advanced the science of probability and statistics,
his name became familiar to mathematicians in the United States where he
eventually fled in 1938, reluctantly, as the Nazi threat grew. His family, all
but a single brother, would later die in the extermination camp known as
Auschwitz.
Soon after Wald arrived in the United States he joined the Applied
Mathematics Panel and went to work with the team at Columbia stuffed in
the secret apartment overlooking Harlem. His group looked for patterns
and applied statistics to problems and situations too large and unwieldy for
commanders to get their arms around. They turned the geometry of air
combat into graphs and charts and they plotted the success rates of bomb
sights and various tactics. As the war progressed, their efforts became
focused on the most pressing problem of the war keeping airplanes in
the sky.

A B-24 is shot down over an island in the Pacific Source:

http://www.britishpathe.com/
In some years of World War II, the chances of a member of a bomber crew
making it through a tour of duty was about the same as calling heads in a
coin toss and winning. As a member of a World War II bomber crew, you
flew for hours above an entire nation hoping to murder you while
suspended in the air, huge, visible from far away, and vulnerable from
every direction above and below as bullets and flak streamed out to
puncture you. Ghosts already, thats how historian Kevin Wilson
described World War II airmen. They expected to die because it always felt
like the chances of surviving the next bombing run were about the same as

running shirtless across a football field swarming with angry hornets and
making it unharmed to the other side. You might make it across once, but if
you kept running back and forth, eventually your luck would run out. Any
advantage the mathematicians could provide, even a very small one, would
make a big difference day after day, mission after mission.
As with the torpedo problem, the top brass explained what they knew, and
the Panel presented the problem to Wald and his group. How, the Army Air
Force asked, could they improve the odds of a bomber making it home?
Military engineers explained to the statistician that they already knew the
allied bombers needed more armor, but the ground crews couldnt just
cover the planes like tanks, not if they wanted them to take off. The
operational commanders asked for help figuring out the best places to add
what little protection they could. It was here that Wald prevented the
military from falling prey to survivorship bias, an error in perception that
could have turned the tide of the war if left unnoticed and uncorrected. See
if you can spot it.
The military looked at the bombers that had returned from enemy territory.
They recorded where those planes had taken the most damage. Over and
over again, they saw the bullet holes tended to accumulate along the
wings, around the tail gunner, and down the center of the body. Wings.
Body. Tail gunner. Considering this information, where would you put the
extra armor? Naturally, the commanders wanted to put the thicker
protection where they could clearly see the most damage, where the holes
clustered. But Wald said no, that would be precisely the wrong decision.
Putting the armor there wouldnt improve their chances at all.
Do you understand why it was a foolish idea? The mistake, which Wald saw
instantly, was that the holes showed where the planes were strongest. The
holes showed where a bomber could be shot and still survive the flight
home, Wald explained. After all, here they were, holes and all. It was the
planes that werent there that needed extra protection, and they had
needed it in places that these planes had not. The holes in the surviving
planes actually revealed the locations that needed the least additional
armor. Look at where the survivors are unharmed, he said, and thats
where these bombers are most vulnerable; thats where the planes that
didnt make it back were hit.
Taking survivorship bias into account, Wald went ahead and worked out
how much damage each individual part of an airplane could take before it
was destroyed engine, ailerons, pilot, stabilizers, etc. and then through
a tangle of complicated equations he showed the commanders how likely it
was that the average plane would get shot in those places in any given
bombing run depending on the amount of resistance it faced. Those
calculations are still in use today.

1944 War Dept US Army Air Forces Training Film Source:

National Archives
The military had the best data available at the time, and the stakes could
not have been higher, yet the top commanders still failed to see the flaws
in their logic. Those planes would have been armored in vain had it not
been for the intervention of a man trained to spot human error.
A question should be forming in the front of your brain at this point. If the
top brass of the United States armed forces could make such a simple and
dumb mistake while focused on avoiding simple and dumb mistakes,
thanks to survivorship bias, does that mean survivorship bias is likely
bungling many of your own day-to-day assumptions? The answer is, of
course, yes. All the time.
Simply put, survivorship bias is your tendency to focus on survivors instead
of whatever you would call a non-survivor depending on the situation.
Sometimes that means you tend to focus on the living instead of the dead,
or on winners instead of losers, or on successes instead of failures. In
Walds problem, the military focused on the planes that made it home and
almost made a terrible decision because they ignored the ones that got
shot down.
It is easy to do. After any process that leaves behind survivors, the nonsurvivors are often destroyed or muted or removed from your view. If
failures becomes invisible, then naturally you will pay more attention to
successes. Not only do you fail to recognize that what is missing might have
held important information, you fail to recognize that there is missing
information at all.
You must remind yourself that when you start to pick apart winners and
losers, successes and failures, the living and dead, that by paying attention
to one side of that equation you are always neglecting the other. If you are
thinking about opening a restaurant because there are so many successful
restaurants in your hometown, you are ignoring the fact the only successful
restaurants survive to become examples. Maybe on average 90 percent of
restaurants in your city fail in the first year. You cant see all those failures
because when they fail they also disappear from view. As Nassim Taleb
writes in his book The Black Swan, The cemetery of failed restaurants is
very silent. Of course the few that dont fail in that deadly of an

environment are wildly successful because only the very best and the very
lucky can survive. All you are left with are super successes, and looking at
them day after day you might think its a great business to get into when
you are actually seeing evidence that you should avoid it.
Survivorship bias pulls you
toward bestselling diet gurus,
celebrity CEOs, and superstar
athletes. Its an unavoidable
tick, the desire to deconstruct
success like a thieving magpie
and pull away the shimmering
bits. You look to the
successful for clues about the
hidden, about how to better
live your life, about how you
too can survive similar forces
against which you too
struggle. Colleges and
conferences prefer speakers
who shine as examples of
making it through adversity, of
Googles Larry Page Source: Fortune
struggling against the odds
Magazine
and winning. The problem here
is that you rarely take away
from these inspirational figures advice on what not to do, on what you
should avoid, and thats because they dont know. Information like that is
lost along with the people who dont make it out of bad situations or who
dont make it on the cover of business magazines people who dont get
invited to speak at graduations and commencements and
inaugurations. The actors who traveled from Louisiana to Los Angeles only
to return to Louisiana after a few years dont get to sit next to James Lipton
and watch clips of their Oscar-winning performances as students eagerly
gobble up their crumbs of wisdom. In short, the advice business is a
monopoly run by survivors. As the psychologist Daniel Kahneman writes in
his book Thinking Fast and Slow, A stupid decision that works out well
becomes a brilliant decision in hindsight. The things a great company like
Microsoft or Google or Apple did right are like the planes with bullet holes
in the wings. The companies that burned all the way to the ground after
taking massive damage fade from memory. Before you emulate the history
of a famous company, Kahneman says, you should imagine going back in
time when that company was just getting by and ask yourself if the outcome
of its decisions were in any way predictable. If not, you are probably seeing
patterns in hindsight where there was only chaos in the moment. He sums it
up like so, If you group successes together and look for what makes them
similar, the only real answer will be luck.
If you see your struggle this way, as partly a game of chance, then as
Google Engineer Barnaby James writes on his blog, skill will allow you to
place more bets on the table, but its not a guarantee of success. Thus, he
warns, beware advice from the successful. Entrepreneur Jason Cohen, in
writing about survivorship bias, points out that since we cant go back in
time and start 20 identical Starbucks across the planet, we can never know

if that business model is the source of the chains immense popularity or if

something completely random and out of the control of the decision
makers led to a Starbucks on just about every street corner in North
America. That means you should be skeptical of any book promising you
the secrets of winning at the game of life through following any particular
example.
It might seem disheartening, the fact that successful people probably owe
more to luck than anything else, but only if you see luck as some sort of
magic. Take off those superstitious goggles for a moment, and consider
this: the latest psychological research indicates that luck is a long
mislabeled phenomenon. It isnt a force, or grace from the gods, or an
enchantment from fairy folk, but the measurable output of a group of
predictable behaviors. Randomness, chance, and the noisy chaos of reality
may be mostly impossible to predict or tame, but luck is something else.
According to psychologist Richard Wiseman, luck bad or good is just
what you call the results of a human being consciously interacting with
chance, and some people are better at interacting with chance than others.

Over the course of 10 years, Wiseman followed the lives of 400 subjects of
all ages and professions. He found them after he placed ads in
newspapers asking for people who thought of themselves as very lucky or
very unlucky. He had them keep diaries and perform tests in addition to
checking in on their lives with interviews and observations. In one study, he
asked subjects to look through a newspaper and count the number of
photographs inside. The people who labeled themselves as generally
unlucky took about two minutes to complete the task. The people who
considered themselves as generally lucky took an average of a few
seconds. Wiseman had placed a block of text printed in giant, bold letters
on the second page of the newspaper that read, Stop counting. There are
43 photographs in this newspaper. Deeper inside, he placed a second
block of text just as big that read, Stop counting, tell the experimenter you
have seen this and win $250. The people who believed they were unlucky
usually missed both.
Wiseman speculated that what we call luck is actually a pattern of behaviors
that coincide with a style of understanding and interacting with the events
and people you encounter throughout life. Unlucky people are narrowly
focused, he observed. They crave security and tend to be more anxious,
and instead of wading into the sea of random chance open to what may
come, they remain fixated on controlling the situation, on seeking a specific
goal. As a result, they miss out on the thousands of opportunities that may
float by. Lucky people tend to constantly change routines and seek out new
experiences. Wiseman saw that the people who considered themselves

lucky, and who then did actually demonstrate luck was on their side over
the course of a decade, tended to place themselves into situations where
anything could happen more often and thus exposed themselves to more
random chance than did unlucky people. The lucky try more things, and fail
more often, but when they fail they shrug it off and try something else.
Occasionally, things work out.
Wiseman told Skeptical Inquirer magazine that he likened it to setting
loose two people inside an apple orchard, each tasked with filling up their
baskets as many times as possible. The unlucky person tends to go to the
same few spots over and over again, the basket holding fewer apples each
visit. The lucky person never visits the same spot twice, and that persons
basket is always full. Change those apples to experiences, and imagine a
small portion of those experiences lead to fame, fortune, riches, or some
other form of happiness material or otherwise, and you can see that chance
is not as terrifying as it first appears, you just need to learn how to
approach it.

The harder they looked, the less they saw. And so it is with
luck unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they
are too focused on looking for something else. They go to
parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss
opportunities to make good friends. They look through
newspapers determined to find certain type of job
advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky
people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is
there rather than just what they are looking for. Richard
Wiseman in an article written for Skeptical Inquirer
Survivorship bias also flash-freezes your brain into a state of ignorance
from which you believe success is more common than it truly is and
therefore you leap to the conclusion that it also must be easier to obtain.
You develop a completely inaccurate assessment of reality thanks to a
prejudice that grants the tiny number of survivors the privilege of
representing the much larger group to which they originally belonged.
Here is an easy example. Many people believe old things represent a
higher level of craftsmanship than do new things. Its sort of a they dont
make them like they used to kind of assumption. Youve owned cars that
only lasted a few years before you had to start replacing them piece by
piece, and, would you look at that, there goes another Volkswagon Beetle
buzzing along like it just rolled off an assembly line. Its survivorship bias at
work. The Beetle or the Mustang or the El Camino or the VW Minibus are
among a handful of models that survived in large enough numbers to
become iconic classics. The hundreds of shitty car designs and millions of
automobile corpses in junkyards around the world far outnumber the
popular, well-maintained, successful, beloved survivors. According to Josh
Clark at HowStuffWorks, most experts say that cars from the last two
decades are far more reliable and safer than the cars of the 1950s and
60s, but plenty of people believe otherwise because of a few high-profile
survivors. The examples that would disprove such assumptions are rusting
out of sight. Do you see how its the same as Walds bombers? The Beetle
survived, like the bombers that made it home, and it becomes a

representative of 1960s cars because it remains visible. All the other cars
that werent made in the millions and werent easy to maintain or were
poorly designed are left out of the analysis because they are now removed
from view, like the bombers that didnt return.
Similarly, photographer Mike Johnston explains on his blog that the
artwork that leaps from memory when someone mentions a decade like
the 1920s or a movement like Baroque is usually made up of things that do
not suck. Your sense of a past era tends to be informed by paintings and
literature and drama that are not crap, even though at any given moment
pop culture is filled with more crap than masterpieces. Why? It isnt
because people were better artists back in the day. It is because the good
stuff survives, and the bad stuff is forgotten. So over time, you end up with
skewed ideas of past eras. You think the artists of antiquity were amazing
in the same way you associate the music of past decades with the songs
that survived long enough to get into your ears. The movies about Vietnam
never seem include in their soundtracks the songs that sucked.

I have to chuckle whenever I read yet another description of

American frontier log cabins as having been well crafted or
sturdily or beautifully built. The much more likely truth is that
99% of frontier log cabins were horribly builtits just that all of
those fell down. The few that have survived intact were the
ones that were well made. That doesnt mean all of them
were. Mike Johnston at The Online Photographer
You succumb to survivorship bias because you are innately terrible with
statistics. For instance, if you seek advice from a very old person about how
to become very old, the only person who can provide you an answer is a
person who is not dead. The people who made the poor health choices
you should avoid are now resting in the earth and cant tell you about those
bad choices anymore. Thats why its difficult not to furrow your brow and
wonder why you keep paying for a gym membership when Willard Scott
showcases the birthday of a 110-year-old woman who claims the source of
her longevity is a daily regimen of cigarillos, cheese sticks, and Wild Turkey
cut with maple syrup and Robitussin. You miss that people like her
represent a very small number of the living. They are on the thin end of a
bell curve. There is a much larger pool of people who basically drank
bacon grease for breakfast and didnt live long enough to appear on
television. Most people cant chug bourbon and gravy for a lifetime and
expect to become an octogenarian, but the unusually lucky handful who can
tend to stand out precisely because they are alive and talking.
The mentalist Derren Brown once predicted he could flip a
coin 10 times in a row and have it come up heads every time.
He then dazzled UK television audiences by doing exactly that, flipping the
coin into a bowl with only one cutaway shot for flair. How did he do it? He
filmed himself flipping coins for nine hours until he got the result he
wanted. He then edited out all the failures and presented the single
success.
Advertisements for weight loss products and fitness regimens operate just
like Derren Browns magic trick, by hiding the failures and letting your

survivorship bias do the rest. Those always use the most positive claims,
the most outrageous examples to sell a product, Phil Plait, an astronomer
and leading voice in the skeptical movement, explained to me. When
these things dont work for the vast majority of customers, you never hear
about it, at least not from the seller. The people who use the diet, or the
product, or the pill, and fail to lose weight dont get trotted out for photo
shoots only the successes do. That same phenomenon has become a
problem in science publications, especially among the younger sciences
like psychology, but it is now under repair. For far too long, studies that
fizzled out or showed insignificant results have not been submitted for
publication at the same level as studies that end up with positive results, or
even worse, theyve been rejected by prominent journals. Left unchecked,
over time you end up with science journals that only present the survivors
of the journal process studies showing significance. Psychologists are
calling it the File Drawer Effect. The studies that disprove or weaken the
hypotheses of high-profile studies seem to get stuffed in the file drawer, so
to speak. Many scientists are pushing for the widespread publication of
replication, failure, and insignificance. Only then, they argue, will the
science journals and the journalism that reports on them accurately
describe the world being explored. Science above all will need to root out
survivorship, but it wont be easy. This particular bias is especially
pernicious, said Plait, because it is almost invisible by definition. The only
way you can spot it is to always ask: what am I missing? Is what Im seeing
all there is? What am I not seeing? Those are incredibly difficult questions
to answer, and not always answerable. But if you dont ask them, then by
definition you cant answer them. He added. Its a pain, but reality can be
a tough nut to crack.
Failure to look for what is missing is a common shortcoming, not just within
yourself but also within the institutions that surround you. A commenter at
an Internet watering hole for introverts called the INTJForum explained it
with this example: when a company performs a survey about job
satisfaction the only people who can fill out that survey are people who still
work at the company. Everyone who might have quit out of dissatisfaction is
no longer around to explain why. Such data mining fails to capture the only
thing it is designed to measure, but unless management is aware of
survivorship bias things will continue to seem peachy on paper. In finance,
this is a common pitfall. The economist Mark Klinedinst explained to me
that mutual funds, companies that offer stock portfolios, routinely prune out
underperforming investments. When a mutual fund tells you, The last five
years we had 10 percent on average return, well, the companies that didnt
have high returns folded or were taken over by companies that were more
lucky. The health of the companies they offer isnt an indication of the
mutual funds skill at picking stocks, said Klinedinst, because theyve
deleted failures from their offerings. All you ever see are the successes.
Thats true for many, many elements of life. Money experts who made
great guesses in the past are considered soothsayers because their
counterparts who made equally risky moves that failed nosedived into
obscurity and are now no longer playing the game. Whole nations left
standing after wars and economic struggles pump fists of nationalism
assuming that their good outcomes resulted from wise decisions, but they
can never know for sure.

Let us suppose that a commander orders 20 men to invade an

enemy bunker. This invasion leads to a complete destruction of
the bunker and only one dead soldier from the 20 person
team. An amazingly successful endeavor. Unless you are the
one soldier who was shot through the head running up the hill.
From his standpoint, rapidly ascending to the spirit world, it
seems like a gigantic waste and a terrible order, but we will
never hear his side of things. We will only hear from the guys
who survived, how it was tough going until they made it over
the rise. How it was sad to lose one guy, but they knew that
they would make it. They just had a feeling. Of course, that one
guy had that feeling to, until he felt nothing. Unknown author
at spacetravelsacrime.blogspot.com
If you spend your life only learning from survivors, buying books about
successful people and poring over the history of companies that shook the
planet, your knowledge of the world will be strongly biased and
enormously incomplete. As best I can tell, here is the trick: When looking
for advice, you should look for what not to do, for what is missing as Phil
Plait suggested, but dont expect to find it among the quotes and
biographical records of people whose signals rose above the noise. They
may have no idea how or if they lucked up. What you cant see, and what
they cant see, is that the successful tend to make it more probable that
unlikely events will happen to them while trying to steer themselves into
the positive side of randomness. They stick with it, remaining open to
better opportunities that may require abandoning their current paths, and
thats something you can start doing right now without reading a single selfhelp proverb, maxim, or aphorism. Also, keep in mind that those who fail
rarely get paid for advice on how not to fail, which is too bad because
despite how it may seem, success boils down to serially avoiding
catastrophic failure while routinely absorbing manageable damage.
Before we depart, Id like
to mention Wald one more
time. Like many of the others who
joined the armed services to fight
Hitler with numbers, Abraham
Wald went down in history, but
not for the bombers and bullet
holes story. He is best
remembered as the inventor of
sequential analysis, another
achievement he earned while
working in the department of war
math. He married Lucille Land in
1941. Two years later they had
their first child, Betty, followed
four years later by another they
named Robert. Three years after
Abraham Wald Source: Prof.
that, at the top of his career and
Konrad Jacobs
enjoying an exotic speaking tour,
after saving the lives of thousands
of people he would never meet, he and Lucille died in an airplane that

crashed against the side of the Nilgiri mountains in India. Perhaps there is
an irony to that, something about airplanes and odds and chance and luck,
but it isnt the interesting part of Walds story. His contributions to science
are what survives his time on Earth and the parts of his tale that will endure.
In 1968, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report saying the
application of mathematics in World War II became recognized as an art,
and the lessons learned by the mathematicians were later applied to
business, science, industry, and management. They saved the world and
then rebuilt it using the same tools each time calculators and chalk.
In 1978, Allen Wallis, Director of SRG said of his team, This was surely the
most extraordinary group of statisticians ever organized. The bomber
problem was just a side story for them, a funny anecdote that only surfaced
in the 1980s as they all began to reminisce full time. When you think of how
fascinating the story is, it makes you wonder about the stories well never
hear about those numerical soldiers because they never made it out of the
war and into a journal, magazine, or book, and how thats true of so much
thats important in life. All we know of the past passes through a million,
million filters, and a great deal is never recorded or is tossed aside to
make room for something more interesting or beautiful or audacious. All
we will learn from history reaches us from the stories that, for whatever
reason, survived.

The new book from the author of You Are Not So Smart You Are
Now Less Dumb
Go deeper into understanding just how deluded you really are and
learn how you can use that knowledge to be more humble, better
connected, and less dumb in the sequel to the internationally
bestselling You Are Not So Smart. Preorder now at: Amazon | Barnes
& Noble | Books-a-Million | Indiebound | iTunes

Sources
Ask HN: Survivor Bias. Why dont we focus more on startups that fail? 21
November 2012. 15 January 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?
id=4812480
Association, The American Statistical. Resolution in Honor of Abraham
Wald. The American Statistician February 1951: 19.
Bodanis, David. E=mc2: A Biography of the Worlds Most Famous
Equation. Penguin, 2004.

. Einstein the Nobody. 11 October 2005. 15 January 2013

&http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/einstein-the-nobody.html
Clark, Josh. Are modern cars less problematic? 22 March 2013
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/under-the-hood/diagnosing-carproblems/mechanical/cars-less-problematic.htm
Cohen, Jason. Business Advice Plagued by Survivor Bias. 17 August
2009. 15 January 2013 http://blog.asmartbear.com/business-adviceplagued-by-survivor-bias.html
Dickersin, K.; Chan, S.; Chalmers, T. C.; et al. (1987). Publication bias and
clinical trials. Controlled Clin Trials 8 (4): 343353.
Erickson, L. (2010). Top Secret Rosies. Retrieved May 2013, from:
http://www.topsecretrosies.com/Top_Secret_Rosies/Home.html
Edmunds.com. Volkswagen New Beetle History. 22 March 2013
http://www.edmunds.com/volkswagen/new-beetle/history.html
Gould, Stephen Jay. Wide Hats and Narrow Minds. New Scientist 8
Match 1979: 776-777.
INTJoe. How often do you consider the Survivorship Bias? 2009
November 2011. 22 March 2013 http://intjforum.com/showthread.php?
t=26327
James, Barnaby. Spolsky on Survivor Bias. 8 February 2009. 15 January
2013 http://www.survivorbias.com/2009/02/spolsky-on-survivorbias.html
Johnston, Mike. The Trough of No Value. 6 February 2009. 15 January
2013
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2009/02/thetrough-of-no-value.html
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2012.
Klinedinst, Mark. Interview in person David McRaney. 21 May 2013.
Menger, Karl. The Formative Years of Abraham Wald and His Work in
Geometry. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics 23.1 (1952): 14-20.
Morgenstern, Oskar. Abraham Wald, 1902-1950. Econometrica 19.4
(1951): 361-367.
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: Kindle Edition: The Impact of
the Highly Improbable. Random House , 2011.
Pettie, Andrew. Derren Brown: The System. 26 Jan 2008. 15 January
2013 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/3670756/DerronBrown-The-System.html
Plait, Phil. Interview via email exchange David McRaney. 2013 March.
Psych File Drawer.
http://www.psychfiledrawer.org/TheFiledrawerProblem.php

Rees, Mina. The Mathematical Sciences and World War II. The
American Mathematical Monthly October 1980: 607-621.
Samaniego, Marc Mangel and Francisco J. Walds Work on Aircraft
Survivability. Journal of the American Statistical Association 79.386
(1984): 259-267.
ScepticaTV. Derren Brown The System (Full). February 2011. 9 May
2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R5OWh7luL4
Scherer, Sina. Bias in psychology: Bring in all significant results. 1 June
2012. 15 2013 January http://jeps.efpsa.org/blog/2012/06/01/falsificationof-previous-results/
Skinner, D. (2006). The Age of Female Computers. Retrieved May
2013, from http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-age-offemale-computers
Smith, M. D., Wiseman, R. & Harris, P. (2000). The relationship between
luck and psi. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research,
94, 25-36.
Smith, M. D., Wiseman, R., Harris, P. & Joiner, R. (1996). On being lucky:
The psychology and parapsychology of luck. European Journal of
Parapsychology, 12, 35-43.
Tte, Annie. SciTech Tuesday: Abraham Wald, Seeing the Unseen. 13
November 2012. 15 January 2013
http://www.nww2m.com/2012/11/scitech-tuesday-abraham-wald-seeingthe-unseen/
Unknown. Our National Survivor Bias. 13 December 2010. 15 January
2013 http://spacetravelsacrime.blogspot.com/2010/12/our-nationalsurvivor-bias.html
Wallis, W. Allen. The Statistical Research Group, 1942-1945. Journal of
the American Statistical Association 75.370 (1980): 320-330.
. The Statistical Research Group, 1942-1945: Rejoinder. Journal of
the American Statistical Association 75.370 (1980): 334-335.
West, Walt. Examining Your Failures Can Lead to More Success: Beware
Survivor Bias Mistakes. 7 April 2011. 15 January 2013
http://www.practicemanagementacademy.com/2011/04/survivor-bias
Wilson, Kevin. Men of Air: The Doomed Youth of Bomber Command.
Orion, 2007.
Wiseman, Richard. The Luck Factor. The Magazine For Science And
Reason May
2003. http://richardwiseman.com/resources/The_Luck_Factor.pdf
Wolfowitz, J. Abraham Wald, 1902-150. The Annals of Mathematical
Statistics 23.1 (1952): 1-13.
Wolverton, M. (2011). Girl Computers. Retrieved May 2013, from
http://www.americanheritage.com/content/girl-computers

Share this:

Tw eet

1,510

38

Like

Email

12k

1.4k

StumbleUpon

Print

Posted By: David McRaney Category: Cognition,

Economics, Introspection, perception, Politics, Social
Psychology, Sociology, Statistics Tags: Abraham
Wald, Albert Einstein, Allen Wallis, Applied Mathematics
Panel, Barnaby James, Daniel Kahneman, INTJForum,
James Burke, Jason Cohen, Josh Clark, Kelvin, Kevin
Kelly, Kevin WilsonMike Johnston, Nassim Taleb, Phil
Plait, Statistical Research Group, Stephen Jay Gould,
Survivorship Bias, The Black Swan, Thinking Fast and
Slow

Tornado Damage
OLDER POST

S IT E M A P

About/Contact
All Posts
Books
Merch
Podcast

NEWER POST

YANSS Podcast
Episode Six

S O C IA L / U P D A T E S

BOOK S TU FF

Facebook
Twitter
Google+
RSS
Podcast RSS
Podcast at Soundcloud
Podcast at Stitcher
Email Updates
Pinterest

You Are Now Less Dumb

Blog at WordPress.com. | Customized ThemeMin Theme.

Preorder the book

You Are Not So Smart
Trailer One
Trailer Two
Buy the book
Sample Chapter
Kindlegraph
Bookplates