How has religion been used to fan the flames of insurrection on Capitol Hill? - welcome to the participants to our zoom briefing today! We'll be live-tweeting as we go along:

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!

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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.

I'll not leave Riddlersworld. But I'll redefine the notion of riddler. A riddler is a person who doesn't know about specific dates and even about dates in general such as the year things will happen. He only knows, in general, some of the events that will take place,... 1/*

a kind of general history, a plot. In this sense continuing in Riddlersworld goes through an approach of minimums, taking riddlers as what gives an outline of some of the events that could happen at an always unknown date. 2/*

Sure, riddlers intend to convey the idea that they do know the dates, or at least the year, but they don’t know them. 3/*

Take 2020 as an example. At this point of the year you can make so many ad hoc statements as you like, but guys, 2020 clearly meant year 2020. 2020 was the year of the visible "outcomes". 4/*

On November 4, 2019 Mr Pool suggested that outcome of action Plan B is what you have been waiting = price increase. It should have happened in November and December 2020, as Plan B ended on November 7, so the outcome should be those months. 5/*

@FionaPearman @ScottMorrisonMP Morrison is our statue of unempathic neoliberalism - erected by evangelical and corporate Australia to celebrate their victory over compassion, equality and secular humanism. 

Hopefully it gets pulled down like the statues of dubious heroes of oppression from an earlier age.

@ScottMorrisonMP The two-party-preferred system in 
Australia politics isn’t working for people, and it sure isn’t working for the planet.

@ScottMorrisonMP My collapse of faith in our democracies isn’t an accident. It’s one of the central victories of the neoliberal project, delivered through two generations of privatisation, outsourcing and deregulation, underfunding of government services (locked in by tax cuts),...

@ScottMorrisonMP restricting freedom of information, targeting whistleblowers and raiding the media who report on them, delegitimising and gagging public interest advocacy, and criminalising protest.

@ScottMorrisonMP Politics in Australia today relies hugely on the fact that most people don’t know most of what’s going on so as to get away with stuff that couldn’t be done under real scrutiny we have seen a clear example of this with the National Coronvirus Cabinet.

My view on lent:

My biggest problem with lent is the public display of fasting which is contrary to scripture: Matthew 6:16-18

Just as well, overhearing discussions of humble brags, “oh man, this is so hard fasting from x” while displaying ashes on one’s forehead seems overtly contrary to scripture. Again, Matthew 6:16-18 is clear.

Additionally it has been my experience that repentance and fasting lose much of their substance for those practicing the tradition.

However....

We cannot oversimplify and call lent a “Roman Catholic invention” or a “pagan” practice given its presence, minimally the term, in the early church with people like Athanasius.

In the modern conception: Advent is to Christmas what lent is to Easter. While asceticism is removed and shallow tradition enters into the practice, this can happen in most everything.