How to treat survivor bias?

Meaning: Survivor bias, as the name implies, is survivor and bias. Survivors are people who have survived the violence of life, in other words, they are lucky people. Deviation is error, which means that people use the method of result reasoning to judge a thing. Survival is the result, there are many processes, including non-survival-death. Therefore, in the process of reasoning, there will inevitably be deviations.

The performance of the survivors' deviation: Recently, there was a joke that a reporter interviewed others on the platform of the railway station whether they had bought a train ticket. You should know that only people who buy train tickets will go to the platform. So, when this reporter comes to a conclusion that everyone has bought train tickets, you can definitely buy them. This is the manifestation of the deviation of survivors.

Why do people have survivor prejudice? People's abilities are limited. Not only can't you see the dark corner, but you are attracted by survivors. Therefore, if you judge things by what you see and hear, you will come to a one-sided conclusion.

In statistics, there is a classic case. The British once made a statistic on the fighters that flew back. After the battle, the damaged part of the plane was mainly in the wing rather than the belly. So, should we reduce the safety devices in the belly and increase the wings? How ridiculous is this? Most of the planes that were attacked in the stomach fell off, but the planes that came back were survivors. Of course, their stomachs will be fine.

How to reduce the deviation of survivors? First: enrich your knowledge, don't always take your direct contact as the primary basis for judging problems, but take some professional knowledge you have learned indirectly as one of the important basis for looking at problems, because what you see is not necessarily true, and what you hear is the same.

Second: learn to analyze what you see and hear. There is a saying that "everyone who hits a dog is a scholar". In fact, groups with higher academic qualifications have much better personal qualities and ways of doing things. On the contrary, dog killers are more likely to be "ungrateful" because of their own environmental restrictions. But conventional cases are so frustrating. It seems that a case is more worthy of being used as talk material and can be more sensational. Therefore, for a "righteous man", it seems that there is nothing to praise, while "ungrateful man" is an explosive talk.

Third, think about the reasons and groups behind the phenomenon. There is a saying that "efforts will surely succeed". Many people still regard it as truth until now. In fact, efforts are not necessarily successful, and successful people are often survivors. If you want to prove this sentence, then successful people will tell you that it is true after your own efforts. Look at me, I succeeded through my own efforts. However, people who fail often choose silence in the face of such problems, and there is another kind of people. Therefore, this statement is unscientific.

The above three points are common misunderstandings of most people. I hope you can gain something after reading it and have your own thinking, so that you can take fewer detours than others in the tide of life. Bless you, dear friend!