In World War II, many bombers flew over enemy territory in Europe, but few returned home. When the planes that survived came back, they were examined for bullet holes which would inform the areas that would most benefit from reinforcement. It was decided that areas exhibiting the most damage would receive additional steel reinforcement.
The problem was that these were the planes that survived. Military analysts, engineers, and scientists alike possessed only one slice of the data. The many bombers lying destroyed in fields or at the bottom of the ocean held the missing data, from which much more useful clues on reinforcement could be found. Adding extra thick steel plates to the body of the planes, wings, and gunner’s turret—all areas suffering the heaviest damage—would be redundant on the planes that actually survived and would, in fact, weigh them down, making them even more vulnerable to failure on missions.
Errors in judgment in the creative field often come from analogous circumstances and is known as “survivorship bias.” If Denzel Washington tells you he ate nothing but baked beans for the forty years prior to becoming an A-list Hollywood star, this anecdote would be missing the data of the
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