Friday, November 11, 2016

Survival bias

Think about everyone you have known personally who was in the Second World War, either as a member of the military or as a civilian who happened to live in an area affected by the war.

They survived the war, didn't they?

Because WWII ended 71 years ago, and, unless I have readers who were alive during WWII themselves (if so, pop in the comments and say hi!), the people we know personally must necessarily have survived WWII because they lived long enough for us to know them personally.

And, because of this, I think we might have the subconscious impression that WWII was more survivable than it actually was.  Even though we know the death rates in raw numbers, we hardly ever have the stories of or from those who died. This is both because you most often have to live to tell the tale (the only exceptions I can think of are Anne Frank and Irène Némirovsky), but also because the vast majority of war deaths don't make interesting stories. If you're walking down the street and a bomb falls on your head, that's not an interesting story. If a soldier goes charging onto the battlefield and is promptly shot by the enemy, that's not an interesting story.

So we don't hear those stories, and because of that we are less inclined to think we would die instantly and unremarkably.  And this is even if we aren't envisioning ourselves as the hero of the story.  I know that when I think about what would happen if I ended up in a war, I'm certainly not under the impression that I could be a successful soldier or a hero of the resistance. But I'm imagining deprivation, suffering, rape and torture, being sent to a concentration camp - unceremonious instant death isn't even on my radar.

I think this extends to other areas of life as well. I've blogged before about gun people who think a good guy with a gun will necessarily beat a bad guy with a gun. They don't seem to be thinking of the possibility that when the good guy pulls out his gun, the bad guy will just shoot him.

I think we also hear it in narratives about serious illness.  We hear about survival stories.  Sometimes, especially when people are trying to sell something, we hear about people who defeated serious illness with traditional medicine or prayer or a very specific regimen of positive thinking that can be yours for three easy payments of $29.99.  Sometimes narratives about serious illness do involve death, and impose meaning on the patient's life or on the patient's death. But you never hear stories where a person gets diagnosed with something, does everything right, and dies meaninglessly.



I've seen cases where this survival bias affects public discourse. I've seen people making public statements that in WWII, various countries being invaded should have just fought back against the Nazis, when the countries in question did in fact have active resistance organizations.  In one of the recent US mass shootings, someone commented that the shooter wouldn't have succeeded if someone else present had had a gun, when in reality there were armed security guards present.

When I was first educating myself about WWI, a recurring theme was that they didn't know what they were getting into. The countries eagerly declaring war on each other and the young men rushing to enlist all seemed to think they were off on a jolly good adventure, none of them imagining just how many people would end up uselessly dead in the middle of no man's land. 

Was survival bias a thing 100 years ago?  And could it lead us into a similarly tragic situation again in the future?

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