What would the two have in common? Well, both are examples of interesting phenomena called selection bias, or less science-y: both trick our brains.
I’ve never seen a good toupée. They all look fake…
You’ll hear people comment how they’ve never seen a good toupée and how they always notice them as they look fake. We wrongly assume that’s because they’re always conspicuous, but the trick is: when a toupée is good, you don’t notice it.
There’s actually a cognitive bias called “toupée fallacy” – name most often credited to Rebecca Watson. It happens when we judge a whole category of something based only on the most noticeable (usually worst) examples. When a toupée is good – we don’t see/notice it. So we don’t take into account all this “silent evidence”, as Taleb calls it, and make a wrong assumption.
Some common toupée fallacy examples
Some examples of toupée fallacy are:
– I can always notice a toupeé (duh!)
– I can always see that the image is AI-generated
– I can always see that the woman is trans
– I can always tell that the bag is fake
– I can always notice that the image is photoshopped
– etc…
Any examples you can think of?
These are the areas we will reinforce…
With survivorship bias, we focus on entities that have passed (survived) a certain selection process, while overlooking the ones that didn’t.
The most famous example of survivorship bias comes from World War II and bombardiers. Let’s say you take a look at all the damaged planes that returned to the base and see where the bullet holes are most common. It’s only reasonable that we reinforce these areas, right? Well, it isn’t. We should do the opposite.
Statistician Abraham Wald faced this challenge in reality and took survivorship bias into account. Since the planes with holes in certain areas were still able to fly well enough to return to base safely, he suggested reinforcing the areas without holes. He inferred that planes hit in those unprotected areas would likely sustain fatal damage.
Examples of survivorship bias
– “They don’t make them like they used to!” A survivorship bias because we only see the durable old items that have survived, ignoring the vast number of lower-quality goods from the past that have long since broken down.
– “Successful entrepreneurs do X!” When studying successful entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, we fall prey to survivorship bias by overlooking the countless others who followed similar paths but failed, creating an overly optimistic (and simplistic) view of entrepreneurial success. (The same goes for seeking advice only from successful people, and neglecting the valuable lessons from many others who followed similar advice but didn’t achieve the same outcomes.)
Do you or have you fallen for these two biases?
*All images are AI-generated