Survivorship bias

The parapsychology researcher Joseph Banks Rhine believed he had identified the few individuals from hundreds of potential subjects who had powers of extra-sensory perception (ESP).

Writing about the Rhine case in Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, Martin Gardner explained that the experimenters had made such obvious mistakes not out of statistical naivety, but rather as a result of subtly disregarding poorly performing subjects.

He postulated that experiments confirming the null hypothesis (i.e., showing no result) would not be reported, but "[e]ventually, one experimenter remains whose subject has made high scores for six or seven successive sessions.

[3] One famous example of immortal time bias occurred in a study by Redelmeier and Singh, which was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine and purported to show that Academy Award-winning actors and actresses lived almost four years longer than their less successful peers.

Additionally, in the financial field survivorship bias is the use of a current index membership set rather than using the actual constituent changes over time.

To use the current 500 members only and create a historical equity line of the total return of the companies that met the criteria would be adding survivorship bias to the results.

Michael Shermer in Scientific American[9] and Larry Smith of the University of Waterloo[10] have described how advice about commercial success distorts perceptions of it by ignoring all of the businesses and college dropouts that failed.

[12] Alec Liu wrote in Vice that "for every Mark Zuckerberg, there's thousands of also-rans, who had parties no one ever attended, obsolete before we ever knew they existed.

"[13] In his book The Black Swan, financial writer Nassim Taleb called the data obscured by survivorship bias "silent evidence".

[14] Diagoras of Melos was asked concerning paintings of those who had escaped shipwreck: "Look, you who think the gods have no care of human things, what do you say to so many persons preserved from death by their especial favour?

[17] Whether it be movie stars, athletes, musicians, or CEOs of multibillion-dollar corporations who dropped out of school, popular media often tells the story of the determined individual who pursues their dreams and beats the odds.

There is much less focus on the many people that may be similarly skilled and determined, but fail to ever find success because of factors beyond their control or other (seemingly) random events.

During World War II, the statistician Abraham Wald took survivorship bias into his calculations when considering how to minimize bomber losses to enemy fire.