News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Survivorship Bias by ryandrake on Friday April 21, 2017 @10:15AM (#14165781)
I had a professor who had the class stand up and all start flipping coins. If you flipped tails you sat down and stopped. After several iterations he interviewed the last remaining standing person to ask him what hard work he did to become such a good coin flipper, and if he had any secrets about coin flipping success he wanted to share with the class. It was a pretty nice exercise and I think applicable generally to the hero-worship that often surrounds successful people.
Re:Survivorship Bias by backpropaganda on Friday April 21, 2017 @05:48PM (#14169692)
This example looks really good at a superficial level, until you dig down into the math. For me to consider someone a really good coin-flipper, he'd have to get at least 10 heads in a row. Even on this measly example, you would need 1024 people in the room to get at least one successful person.

It's reasonable to assume that becoming successful in business requires you to make more than 20 correct decisions, and depending on the level of success, probably closer to 30-50 good decisions, and a population of billions and trillions just to find one successful person.

Conclusion: real life is not just coin flips. If it were, noone would be successful.

Re:Survivorship Bias by aoeusnth1 on Friday April 21, 2017 @05:59PM (#14169757)
How about: success is log-normally distributed, with individual factors, environmental and random factors all ~multiplying together. If you select the most successful people, they are likely to be both talented AND lucky.
Re:Survivorship Bias by backpropaganda on Friday April 21, 2017 @06:08PM (#14169815)
Sure. Talent is a function of luck too. I'm not denying the role of luck. Just saying that someone who made it big is not following a random policy, and that imitating their behaviour might help you too.
Re:Survivorship Bias by MagnumOpus on Friday April 21, 2017 @07:37PM (#14170276)
If talent counts as luck, everything does. Maybe you mean that talent is also outside the individuals purview?

In the context of predicting success it does not make sense to put talent - or other non-changeable initial endowments like country of birth, parental wealth, attractiveness - into the "luck" bucket. While you can't do anything about these factors, an accurate assessment of them will tell you a lot about your chances of success in a given domain.

I.e.: you might need all three of exceptional talent, hard work and luck to succeed in an endeavour - and while luck might be random, and "hard work" can be influenced by yourself, the talent factor can be gauged but cannot be influenced so it can be a hard limit that should guide you in the path you take. I.e. you don't dedicate your life to being a supermodel if you were born butt-ugly, or to be an NBA player if you are 5 feet tall. You might succeed, but your chances are microscopic.

Re:Survivorship Bias by jrjf940 on Sunday April 23, 2017 @08:52AM (#14177966)
why would talent not count as luck?
Re:Survivorship Bias by neilk on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @01:19PM (#14195831)
You're refuting the wrong point here. It's not that business involves no skill. It's that the difference between competitors can be due to random chance.

Two people could have equal ability to make decisions - some good, some bad. In some fields of endeavor, they might succeed about equally.

But in startupland, it's easy for one wrong decision to kill the business, so they are removed from ever trying again. Or one right decision could cause them to experience accelerating returns – which compensates for all the other dumb mistakes, and eventually kills off their competitors.

So, paradoxically, the more cutthroat the environment, and the more exponential the possible returns, the less we can use survivorship as evidence of superior skill.

Note that I'm not saying a successful businessperson is unskilled. It's just that it's not conclusive evidence of superior skills.

Re:Survivorship Bias by Schwolop on Sunday April 23, 2017 @10:22PM (#14181535)
"The secrets to my coin flipping success? Easy - just keep standing."
Re:Survivorship Bias by EduardoBautista on Friday April 21, 2017 @10:53AM (#14166104)
That is a terrible example. That's implying that you can just sit on your ass all day and just watch TV and you have a 50% shot at success.
Re:Survivorship Bias by dgritsko on Friday April 21, 2017 @11:02AM (#14166179)
It doesn't seem like that was implied. If I understand correctly, the goal of the illustration was just to emphasize that luck can play a huge factor in one's success (and therefore their "success" in these cases isn't anything that can be learned from or replicated).
Re:Survivorship Bias by 6nf on Friday April 21, 2017 @11:01AM (#14166168)
You still have to flip the coin
Re:Survivorship Bias by EduardoBautista on Friday April 21, 2017 @11:02AM (#14166176)
A much better example would be to have all students run around a 400 meter track with some students having 1 - 100 meter head start.
Re:Survivorship Bias by jerf on Friday April 21, 2017 @11:07AM (#14166223)
No, that would completely miss the point.

This isn't about inequality or privilege, this is about survivorship bias. The entire point is to completely remove all those issues in a way that makes it obvious to everybody that the only possible explanation in this made-up example is blind luck.

In the real world, it isn't all blind luck, but sometimes there are cases where the luck signal does in fact overwhelm everything else, lotteries being a great example.

Re:Survivorship Bias by EduardoBautista on Friday April 21, 2017 @11:26AM (#14166377)
Yes, and these are _extreme_ examples. Examples that try to make success appear to be just luck.
Re:Survivorship Bias by jerf on Friday April 21, 2017 @11:28AM (#14166393)
"The entire point is to completely remove all those issues in a way that makes it obvious to everybody that the only possible explanation in this made-up example is blind luck."
Re:Survivorship Bias by snerbles on Friday April 21, 2017 @01:16PM (#14167416)
Your racetrack analogies are deviating too far from the classroom example. If you want to model selective advantages, give one student additional coins to flip.
Re:Survivorship Bias by devdad on Friday April 21, 2017 @11:07AM (#14166231)
Some students would have to start at 600 meters with led shoes and weights in their hands. And another group should get to start at 200 meters on bikes.
Re:Survivorship Bias by xxs on Friday April 21, 2017 @11:14AM (#14166280)
when I read 'led shoes', I thought of the one that literally have LED on them and flash/glow. Then I realized it was meant to be the lead element (Pb), that's actually pronounced (led)...

Also typing/pronouncing/using 'LED lights' makes for a great tautology. ("Light emitting diode" lights)

English is weird, sometimes.

Re:Survivorship Bias by jdmichal on Friday April 21, 2017 @03:07PM (#14168393)
That's RAS Syndrome -- redundant acronym syndrome syndrome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome

Re:Survivorship Bias by TeMPOraL on Friday April 21, 2017 @11:09AM (#14166246)
Try 100-200m head start, because 1-10m doesn't appropriately capture how successes compound over time.
Re:Survivorship Bias by cm2012 on Friday April 21, 2017 @11:44AM (#14166559)
LOL at 1-10 meters.
Re:Survivorship Bias by vog on Friday April 21, 2017 @12:49PM (#14167195)
Why do you think so? The coin was flipped multiple (n) times, so the probability of total success is 0.5^n. For 10 coin flips, it is already less than 1/1000.

Alternatively, you can view it as a game that is repeated until one person is left. So the chance of success is 1/n where n is the number of people involved - independent of the random method chosen for selection (coin flip, rolling dices, or whatever).