07/28/2025
Antonio Brown has had some massive head injuries and may have CTE. He may not understand survivorship bias but that doesn’t mean you can’t!
My husband sent me this post from Reddit. It struck us as a great example of survivorship bias. The red dots on the plane show where bullets hit aircraft that made it back to base during WWII. Initially, military analysts wanted to add armor where they saw the most bullet holes, but statistician Abraham Wald realized this was backwards thinking - they should armor the areas with NO holes, because planes hit in those critical spots (like the engine or cockpit) never made it home to be counted. The planes they could examine represented only the 'survivors.'
Many people pushed back against the COVID-19 vaccine (and other vaccines), saying they didn't get the vaccine(s) and did just fine, but we're only hearing from the people who survived to tell their story - just like we only saw the planes that made it back. The voices we're not hearing are from those who didn't make it back to share their experience. When someone says 'I know lots of unvaccinated people who were fine,' they're looking at the equivalent of planes with bullet holes in non-critical areas. The unvaccinated people who had severe outcomes, long-term complications, or died from COVID aren't around to counter that narrative or share their stories on social media.
This is why we need to look at population-level data and clinical studies rather than relying on personal anecdotes to understand vaccine effectiveness and safety. Not saying that your personal experiences don't matter, but they alone aren't able to tell the full story.
https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/1/survivorship-bias-how-lessons-from-world-war-two-affect-clinical-research-today
https://www.ams.org//publicoutreach/feature-column/fc-2016-06
