Survivorship bias Memes

The perfect storm of statistical misunderstanding. The doctor's streak of 20 survivors is mathematically irrelevant to your individual 50% chance. Meanwhile, the patient's blissful ignorance is distributed on a bell curve with the statistically literate person in the middle having an existential crisis. Nothing says "I understand probability" like sweating profusely while explaining why past surgical outcomes don't influence future ones. Your surgery odds remain stubbornly fixed at 50% regardless of how many lucky patients preceded you—much like how flipping heads 20 times doesn't make the next coin toss any more likely to be tails. Statistics: simultaneously the most useful and most psychologically torturous branch of mathematics.