Survivorship Bias
Records are kept by the survivors, so any base rate built from what you can see is biased upward. Fund track records, founder advice and back-tested strategies all suffer from it, because the failures left no trace to count. The fix is to reconstruct the full starting cohort before drawing any conclusion about what works.
6 books · 1 people behind it · 3 resources
Start here
- How to Lie with StatisticsDarrell Huff, 1954
- The Halo EffectPhil Rosenzweig, 2007
- Fooled by RandomnessNassim Nicholas Taleb, 2001
The people behind it 1
Each person holds a book in this entry or names it in their own tags.
Academics 1
Resources 3
- Survivorship Bias: The Tale of Forgotten FailuresShane Parrish · essay · Counting only the winners corrupts every base rate.
- Lucky vs. RepeatableMorgan Housel · essay · Separating skill from luck in a track record.
- Birth, Death, and Wealth CreationMichael J. Mauboussin · paper · Corporate life cycles and where value actually accrues.
Books 6
Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 2007
Michael J. Mauboussin · 2012
David Epstein · 2013 · Talent, training and genetics in elite athletic performance