Survival bias

“The only way you can spot it is to always ask: what am I missing? Is what I’m seeing all there is? What am I not seeing? Those are incredibly difficult questions to answer, and not always answerable.”

You are not so smart (thanks Olivier!)

I feel pretty good at avoiding the survival bias. I’m always asking these questions, it’s almost a curse to me. But that’s also why I’ve been avoiding putting Steve Jobs on a pedestal or how I find interesting the fact that Bill Gates unlike everyone else who was building computer companies at that time, decided that hardware didn’t matter. That was bold as hell. The survival bias would have push him NOT to do that, at all. Luck, skills, the rest is history.

My biggest personal survival bias fight is not to search about my past, like most adopted people do, like expressions like  “to know your future, you must first know your past” enforce. I have always felt that I was better off being free, living something few people on this planet can talk about: having a “pure” mind, disconnected from my parents, families,relatives. Having my own start of my story and going where I want to.

But it’s very hard. Society is full of survival bias, pushes everyone to follow mistakes of the past (gay people; don’t get married!), follow a dominant, failing culture etc. That’s why when I want to know “what’s best” I tend to enlarge my scope to the entire human history: walls we were building with hemp centuries ago are the best? Let’s do that. Synthesizers computer plugins sound as good or “good enough” compared to original, heavy, expensive and hard to maintain “real” synthesizers? I’m sold.

There’s tons of “best ideas” around the world and across time. Survival bias makes us very shy to discover all this shit.

Let’s review our options with the widest vision possible because like the article points out:

“Success boils down to serially avoiding catastrophic failure while routinely absorbing manageable damage.”