Survivorship Bias and the Psychology of Luck
summary
A WWII Applied Mathematics Panel dataset about returning bombers leads Abraham Wald to recommend adding armor where there are no bullet holes, not where the heat map is dense, and that decision measurably raises survivability. Modern work by Richard Wiseman studies ~400 people over 10 years and uses a newspaper test to show lucky people spot a printed “Stop counting” instruction more often. Survivorship bias hides failures; lucky behavior means sampling more options (the apple-orchard strategy) rather than repeating one safe choice.
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