Survivorship bias

Survivorship bias is a cognitive shortcut that makes you ignore everything that didn’t survive some kind of selection process, focusing instead on only the “winners” in a particular field.

The next time you take a walk outside, look at the trees in your neighborhood. Then, try and consider all the trees you don’t see - the ones that didn’t survive the evolutionary process and are now extinct.

It’s not easy, is it? There are far more species of trees that have gone extinct than ones that haven’t, yet we never consider the beauty of the ones we don’t see. That’s survivorship bias.

Here’s Nassim Nicholas Taleb defining survivorship bias in his book, Fooled By Randomness:

“In a nutshell, the survivorship bias implies that the highest performing realization will be the most visible. Why? Because the losers do not show up… The mistake of ignoring the survivorship bias is chronic, even (or perhaps especially) among professionals. How? Because we are trained to take advantage of the information that is lying in front of our eyes, ignoring the information that we do not see.”

All around you, you only see winners. When you’re watching movies or YouTube or Twitch, you’re watching the actors who got the part, the creators who were boosted by the algorithm, and the gamers who made it big.

Everything else is hidden - the losers don’t show up.