Survival of the survivors is comically tautological. Surely there is still something that survivors have in common that makes them the fittest, or non-survivors have in common that makes them the not-fittest.
Isn't that just survivor bias? Those people who survived when most people died were the ones who didn't do what most people did. But most of the time in life, most of the people survive and it is the few who don't.
Can you elaborate on why you think survivorship bias doesn’t apply here?
If you fall off a ship in the middle of the ocean you might survive and those survivors may have had strategies but we just don’t know if the people that died did not have the same strategies. Same goes for this list I’d think.
Devil's advocate: if you find a trait common to all the survivors, which those who died did not have, then you have found something that might be necessary to survive that far (though it may not be sufficient). Some organisms possess immunity to certain pathogens.
Of course you can't just expect to follow Pixar's bets (or Apple's, or Google's, or ...) and expect to win big. But understanding the way they played is important, if you're playing the game too.
(As you touch on too, tempering the natural tendency to give credit for success rather than chalking it up to chance is also important. But I can't believe that Jobs' success is survivorship bias alone.)
"Survive" is the one bit of advice that, by definition, is immune to survivorship bias.
Basically, Justin is saying "the ones that survived are the ones that survived". It's stating the painfully obvious, however it's a simple contrast to the normal "strategic" advice.
And if you collapse, you will almost certainly die, unless you are, essentially, lucky: supplies, survival skills, clan, etc.
If the author is actually telling the truth, it is a classic survivor bias. Sure that will involve some useful stuff, but also it is survivor bias in the sense that they randomly survived and others did not, and they don't know what the others did or did not do to live.
Kind of obvious but can it be simply a selection bias? The weakest died in the camps, the survivors would be the healthier, stronger, and therefore have a longer life expectancy than average.
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