1 Matching Annotations
- Jul 2023
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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Abraham Wald
- example
- survivorship bias
- Abraham Wald was a statistican who was tasked by the Allied war effort with understanding how to make the Allied war planes function better.
- And he was presented with a series of airplanes that had bullet holes throughout them as they had gone from bombing runs over Nazi Germany.
- And he looked at them, and he saw that there were
- holes in the wings,
- holes in the tail,
- holes in the nose of the plane.
- And the general said to him, you know, "Based on your statistical expertise, where should we put extra armor?
- Where should we reinforce the plane?"
- And most of the people thought they should put them where the bullet holes were.
- Abraham Wald took one look at this, and he said, "If you put armor over the places where the holes are,
- you're going to make the planes get shot down more."
- Because the reality was the places that didn't have bullet holes were the most crucial.
- The places that had been shot in
- the fuselage,
- the middle of the plane where the engine was,
- those were in Germany, they didn't survive,
- they were wrecks.
- So they never made it back to be analyzed.
- So survivorship bias is a bias where we look at the wrong kinds of data because we only look at what survived.
- survivorship bias
- example
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