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Survivor Bias

2veritasium

563K subscribers • 1 video on Rounds

YouTube
  • Recommended by 1 person, in Hacker News.

For anyone, no background needed. Education, not medical advice.

1M views10 years ago1 recommendation

Brain and nervesNeuroscience

An explanation of survivorship bias, showing how drawing conclusions from incomplete, biased samples leads to systemic errors in judgment.

Consider that the sample you observe is incomplete, and biased in a particular way.

Why it's here

1 person recommends this

What people say. Highly recommended as a clear and classic explanation of survivorship bias and its real-world implications.

sillysaurus3in Hacker News • Recommends

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Happy to see Veritasium getting some attention on HN. You may have seen his previous video from 2014, Facebook Fraud: link One of my favorite videos is on his alternate channel, 2veritasum. Survivor Bias: link to this video

ThinkerRin Hacker News • Mentions

On “Breaking a myth: Data shows you don’t actually need a co-founder”

Makes me think of the survivor bias episode of Veritaseum link to this video or the french caster ScienceEtonnante on the Simpson Paradox link link

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…ds that might shoot up a school" even though all of these examples refer only to the most extreme members of the group2. > but those articles have been my portal to his world If you're going to make accusations about someone, you should probably check if those articles (aka indirect knowledge) are both accurate and representative. 1 link 2 link to this video…

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On “The Price of Free Is Actually Too High”

…ort term, defiantly fatal within a year or two), or skipping a few months of food . For the record, I'm fine living frugally. I simply suggest that it's important to avoid falling victim to a filter bubble or survivor bias1, because there are a lot of people - even engineers in Silicon Valley - that have an even worse2 situation that mine. 1 link to this video 2 I'm fortunate to have the privilege of being male and white . My friends without those privileges have only…

pdkl95in Hacker News • Mentions

On “Why most female newscasters have the same hair”

> Allowed to be bald?! Allowed to be bald and keep their job . > What are they supposed to do? Straighten it? YES . Again, from the article: >> But dismissing certain styles as “distracting” can also amount to discrimination, especially when it comes to women of color in the industry. “You’ll do better with straight hair,” says Brittany Noble Jones, a digital and broadcast journalist who is black and who relaxed her natural hair for years. For many like her, the expectation isn't just that you'll conform to a certain anchor bob — it includes replacing your hair's natural texture with something else. Also, the business doesn't pay for the chemical relaxers. That gets expensive on a local news…

sillysaurusxin Hacker News • Mentions

On “Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis”

is that actually the case? are model weights being published less frequently? It sure feels like it. But it could be survivorship bias: link to this video or regression to the mean: link . It's possible that StyleGAN and GPT-2 just happened to coincide, and both companies just happened to decide to release their models rather than hoard them, and that the usual case is for companies to rarely (if ever) release weights with their research. But the more interesting question is, why wouldn't they? So onward to your second one: are ethical concerns actually the reasons some models/weights are not released? Or is it about hoarding a potentially valuable commodity? Or some other reason, or a combination…

stevenjgarnerin Hacker News • Mentions

On “I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)”

…ere then fortunate enough to acquire a customer that was a newly minted public company, representing a whopping 65% of our business. Banker's dream, but in actuality a big mistake. Then the double-whammy of fraud by that public company (wiping it out completely before our contract was realized) AND the dot-com crash. Killer asteroids are real. 1 link to this video…