{"id":1633,"date":"2013-06-27T01:40:10","date_gmt":"2013-06-27T01:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/?p=1633"},"modified":"2013-06-27T01:40:10","modified_gmt":"2013-06-27T01:40:10","slug":"survival-bias","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/2013\/06\/survival-bias\/","title":{"rendered":"Survival bias"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe only way you can spot it is to always ask: what am I missing? Is what I\u2019m seeing all there is? What am I not seeing? Those are incredibly difficult questions to answer, and not always answerable.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

You are not so smart<\/a> (thanks Olivier!)<\/p>\n

I feel pretty good at avoiding the survival bias. I\u2019m always asking these questions, it\u2019s almost a curse to me. But that\u2019s also why I\u2019ve 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

My biggest personal survival bias fight is not to search about my past, like most adopted people do, like expressions like  \u201cto know your future, you must first know your past\u201d<\/em> enforce. I have always felt that I was better off being free, living something few people on this planet can talk about: having a \u201cpure\u201d mind, disconnected from my parents, families,relatives. Having my own start of my story and going where I want to.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s very hard. Society is full of survival bias, pushes everyone to follow mistakes of the past (gay people; don\u2019t get married!), follow a dominant, failing culture etc. That\u2019s why when I want to know \u201cwhat\u2019s best\u201d I tend to enlarge my scope to the entire human history: walls we were building with hemp centuries ago are the best? Let\u2019s do that. Synthesizers computer plugins sound as good or \u201cgood enough\u201d compared to original, heavy, expensive and hard to maintain \u201creal\u201d synthesizers? I\u2019m sold.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s tons of \u201cbest ideas\u201d around the world and across time. Survival bias makes us very shy to discover all this shit.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s review our options with the widest vision possible because like the article points out:<\/p>\n

\u201cSuccess boils down to serially avoiding catastrophic failure while routinely absorbing manageable damage.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe only way you can spot it is to always ask: what am I missing? Is what I\u2019m seeing all there is? What am I not seeing? Those are incredibly difficult questions to answer, and not always answerable.\u201d You are not so smart (thanks Olivier!) I feel pretty good at avoiding the survival bias. I\u2019m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1633"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1633\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}