Survivorship Bias - Interesting concept (copied)
During World War II, engineers studied bullet holes on planes that returned from combat. Their first instinct was to reinforce the areas that had the most damage, since those spots seemed to get hit the most.
But there was a flaw in that logic. The planes they were studying were the ones that survived. If a plane came back with bullet holes in certain areas, that meant those areas could take damage and still make it home. The planes that were hit in more critical areas never returned, so they weren’t part of the data being analyzed.
So instead of reinforcing the parts with the most bullet holes, the smarter move was to reinforce the areas with few or no bullet holes on the surviving planes — because hits there were likely fatal.
That’s survivorship bias: drawing conclusions based only on the successes or survivors, while ignoring the failures that never made it into the sample.