Plays from YouTube
Survivorship Bias
Armor Where There Are No Holes
- Thinking traps
- 54 s
WWII bombers came home full of bullet holes, so where should the extra armor go? Statistician Abraham Wald asked about the planes that never came back, and the answer flipped. Survivorship bias in under a minute (and yes, the famous dotted-plane picture was drawn decades later).
Sources (3)
- Abraham Wald, "A Method of Estimating Plane Vulnerability Based on Damage of Survivors" (Statistical Research Group, 1943)
- Mangel & Samaniego, "Abraham Wald's Work on Aircraft Survivability", JASA 1984 (opens in a new tab)
- Cameron Moll on the origin of the dotted-plane diagram (opens in a new tab)
