The author got incredibly lucky multiple times in ways that are flat out impossible today. This is a shining example of survivorship bias touted as “I did it and so can you!”. Good for the author - he’s clearly industrious and made smart decisions, but treating this as a guide for anything other than “increase your luck surface and take calculated risks” is not going to help many people.
FYI: You're replying to the person who wrote the article.
That said, I do think he's raging against people pointing out Survivorship bias [1] rather than Confirmation bias. But perhaps the confusion between the two is the reason he's missing the point: the "critics" are not so much pointing out that a successful person's advice is worthless and that their success is sheer luck and that therefore you shouldn't try - it's that whatever worked for them might not work for you, and whatever did not work for them might work for you. In other words, don't expect a successful person's advice to be a magic formula, and don't be discouraged if their advice seems unattainable for you to follow.
I don’t understand how survivorship bias is being used here. I thought it was a wholly backward-looking error of not taking into account failures along with the successes, not something that somehow empowers future success.
Survivorship bias is the major flaw in every business book and in all biographies of successful people. "Look at the attributes that success stories have in common, and IGNORE them when present in unsuccessful stories." This leads to people and companies cargo-culting the behaviors of well-known rich people and businesses, expecting success. Go read _Good To Great_. Business schools across the world are enamored with this book, but it's basically 300 pages of survivorship bias.
For every person you point to and say grit and perseverance made them successful, I'll point to ten who failed despite grit and perseverance.
It’s good to be aware of survivor bias but the discussion around it has been overdone and leads to pointless defeatism.
The airplane example is the canonical example but also ironic because it’s an example where there was a ton to learn from survivors. Their first takeaway was logically inconsistent but eventually they realized that places without bullet holes were the most important to armor. Because planes shot in other places survived. If no planes survived they’d learn nothing but instead they learned something useful from the survivors.
It doesn’t change that a WW2 fighter pilot would need some luck to survive but if he took the right lessons from survivors and armored his plane in the correct places he’d improve his probability of surviving.
One of my favorite pieces of business advice is since 90% of businesses fail, start 10 businesses and you’ll probably succeed. Of course that oversimplifies things but so does the original statistic . It’s also useful advice that helps you re-frame “luck” as stochastic risk that you can manage. And learning ways to lower probability of failure is a great way to manage risk even if there’s always some element of randomness at play.
Bringing up "survivorship bias" every single time this topic comes up goes far, far beyond just talking about the possibility of failure. It's a self defeating mantra people use to justify their inaction.
And even if it is "survivorship bias" and for every 1 example of someone that succeeds there are 1 million examples of people who have failed, the cost of failure is so low that you should try anyway. It costs you nothing and you have potentially everything to gain.
Ever hear about the story of the two wolves? You're feeding the wrong wolf.
> Survivorship bias doesn't relate to people who worked hard, improved themselves and now earn 1-10MM/yr. There are loads of stories like that.
The point is that, due to survivorship bias, it is hard for us to know whether working hard and improving yourself is actually a better path to success than any of the alternative things you could be doing.
"But it dawns on me that luck is just the product of all these other qualities"
This, to me, highlights the flaw in the whole article. They nearly died. They were saved by a chance encounter with a friendly boat. This encounter was SO OBVIOUSLY not a product of their own motivation, boldness or any of the rest of that guff.
I was tempted to reply with a link to the wiki article for survivorship bias, but that would come across snarkier than I intend. Seriously though, this is a bit like taking advice on financial risk-taking from a startup billionaire.
I really don't think there are many people at all who are in a position to make use of the advice in the book, and of those who are I really don't think there are any who would actually benefit from it.
>2-4 are great examples of survivorship bias.
>For every success story with those traits are thousands of failures.
I guess that is the reason why 2-4 start with "luck from...".
I read it like this: from the ones who do/are X only a few lucky succeed. But (almost) all who don't do/are X fail. To succeed you need both: luck + X.
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