Survivorship

I find this little interaction on Bluesky very funny.

The original image refers to a famous story about survivorship bias: during WWII the Air Force wanted to reinforce its planes and collected data about where they were being hit. Abraham Wald remarked that data were being gathered only on returning planes and so armour should be added at exactly the areas not suggested by the figure. Planes hit at the red dots were capable of flying back!

Dan’s joke and my response are of course very meta, referring to exactly the effect the picture is used to illustrate. But it's also funny because Dan’s point is also true in a literal sense and that was my first response: that picture just doesn't get old. There will always be occasions when it is relevant--someone is sampling on the dependant variable--and then there will always be people who encounter it for the first time and repost it because it's so pithy. And we will all be reminded of it because it's being boosted.

And when it's not being reposted, of course we're not going to see it. There, I got to make the joke again in explaining it!