Horseshoe theory sets off my bs detector & the divisions on the left leave me at a loss for an explanation- Venn diagram? Another shape? What's going on?
Enter @bastardspod! They really break this down & sort it out in a way that helped me out a lot.

Survivorship Bias 101

History is written by the victors. But if we exclusively focus on these successes, we allow survivorship bias to distort our understanding of the world.

But what is "survivorship bias" and how does it work?

Here's Survivorship Bias 101!

👇👇👇

1/ First, a few definitions.

Survivorship bias is the logical error of concentrating on survivors (successes) and ignoring casualties (failures).

When we do so, we miss the true "base rates" of survival (the actual probability of success) and arrive at flawed conclusions.

2/ When we completely ignore failures, we lose our ability to correctly identify the differences between successes and failures.

Put simply, exclusively focusing on successes may actually inhibit our ability to identify (and replicate) the actions that led to such success.

3/ Cicero wrote on the topic over 2,000 years ago.

An atheist named Diagoras is shown portraits of people who prayed and were saved from death at sea as proof of God's existence.

Diagoras replies, "I see those who were saved, but where are those painted who were shipwrecked?"

4/ Cicero cuts right to the point - we cannot conclude that prayer led to being saved from the sea if we ignore those who prayed and then drowned.

Survivorship bias can lead to a deeply-flawed understanding of cause-and-effect relationships.

Let's look at some examples.

*puts on hard hat, respirator, asbestos gloves* (hey i haven't used these in awhile!)

okay. i'm seeing the same claims on my TL over & over that quite frankly, make no sense. & now they're starting to broken-telephone into each other so:

my thoughts on vaccine schedule.

first off, let me get one thing across to start: this is not 2 doses v. 1 dose, it's 2 spaced 3-4 weeks apart vs. 2 spaced several months apart.

anyway, to begin: if you are reluctant to modify vaccine dosing schedule from the 3-weeks-apart one that we had in the Pfizer/BioNTech PhaseIII, *that's fine*. that's a legitimate reason.

but say just that. we know this works, we don't know about other regimes.

but for the love of all that is holy, please do not try to imply that this is a hard requirement, or optimal (imho, it likely isn't), or even *chosen for any reason other than being the shortest interval we could use to complete the PhIII ASAP*. that's it.

i'll be honest, i'm amazed 3 weeks *works*. it's shorter than *the shortest MINIMUM interval* for any other vaccine as scheduled according to, say, the CDC:

"The engineers on my team just want to code. They don't want to have anything to do with product. They just want specs. What do I do?"

1/n Are you asking them do to X *and* do their "day job" as defined by their managers (and frankly your roadmap) ?

If so, start there...

2/n Do they have a reason to believe that doing X will in any way improve the quality of the product and make their lives easier? Have they ever seen X "work" ?

Show don't tell.

3/n Is there average day/week a quagmire of unnecessary meetings, wading through tech debt, struggling to get *anything* to work ... and jumping through process hoops to prove their worth?

If so...no they will not have bandwidth.

4/n How do incentives work on the engineering team? Maybe they want to help, but their "grade" is determined by something altogether different.

"I'd love to, but I am on the hook to deliver [some project] this quarter to make a good impression..."

Talk to eng management.

5/n Have they had any time to practice?

Or did they get thrown into the deep end the first time they were given a shot ... expected to brainstorm on demand, be as vocal as practiced PdMs and designers, and "participate" !

Make it safe to practice. Reasonable expectations.

Daily Bookmarks to GAVNet 02/11/2021