This meme brilliantly captures the statistical reality of life through survivorship bias! The airplane diagram shows bullet holes (red dots) recorded on returning WWII aircraft. Military analysts initially wanted to add armor where the bullets hit, until mathematician Abraham Wald pointed out the obvious-but-genius insight: these planes survived despite being hit in these areas. The planes shot in unmarked areas never made it back to be counted! Just like in life, we only see the "survivors" — successful businesses, relationships, experiments — while the failures disappear from view. Your sample size is literally missing all the crashes!
Missing Data: The Planes That Never Returned
10 months ago
27,846 views
0 shares
survivorship-bias-memes, statistics-memes, probability-memes, war-memes, engineering-memes | ScienceHumor.io
More Like This
The Lonely Genius Of Isaac Newton
11 months ago
23.3K views
0 shares
The Mathematical Scenic Route To Nowhere
1 year ago
27.7K views
0 shares
The Reality Of STEM
1 year ago
28.2K views
0 shares
The Great Mathematical Land Grab
1 year ago
21.9K views
0 shares
Loading more content...
Academia
Ai
Astronomy
Biology
Chemistry
Climate
Conspiracy
Earth-science
Engineering
Evolution
Geology