Logical fallacies

survivorship bias

You are only looking at the ones that made it.

  • “Every founder I’ve read about took huge risks.”

    “What happened to everyone else who took them?”

    The ones it destroyed didn’t get a book deal.

The canonical case: WWII analysts studying returning bombers wanted to armour where the bullet holes were. Abraham Wald pointed out those were the survivable hits—armour where the returning planes weren’t hit, because planes hit there didn’t come back.

How to answer it: ask where the failures went and whether anyone counted them. If they’re not in the data, the data isn’t answering the question.

Now go count the ones that did not make it.