• key observation
  • the dynamics and relationship between
    • self-selection bias and
    • survivorship bias
  • gives us insight of how power operates
  • The wrong kinds of people who are power-hungry, seek power more in the first place.
  • Then they're better at obtaining it.
  • They show up in our ordinary lives because they've survived,
    • they've made it.
  • So when we think about who is powerful,
    • we have to think about
      • the people who didn't seek power in the first place and
      • the people who didn't obtain power in the first place.
      • the people who didn't survive in power for very long, and therefore they dropped out.
    • The presidents and prime ministers,
    • the generals,
    • the cult leaders,
    • the business leaders,
  • those people are basically people who have survived and who self-selected.

• example
  • survivorship bias
    • Abraham Wald was a statistican who was tasked by the Allied war effort with understanding how to make the Allied war planes function better.
    • And he was presented with a series of airplanes that had bullet holes throughout them as they had gone from bombing runs over Nazi Germany.
    • And he looked at them, and he saw that there were
      • holes in the wings,
      • holes in the tail,
      • holes in the nose of the plane.
    • And the general said to him, you know, "Based on your statistical expertise, where should we put extra armor?
    • Where should we reinforce the plane?"
    • And most of the people thought they should put them where the bullet holes were.
    • Abraham Wald took one look at this, and he said, "If you put armor over the places where the holes are,
      • you're going to make the planes get shot down more."
    • Because the reality was the places that didn't have bullet holes were the most crucial.
    • The places that had been shot in
      • the fuselage,
      • the middle of the plane where the engine was,
    • those were in Germany, they didn't survive,
      • they were wrecks.
    • So they never made it back to be analyzed.
    • So survivorship bias is a bias where we look at the wrong kinds of data because we only look at what survived.

• There's two forms of bias around power that are really important to understand.
  • The first is self-selection bias, but then there's another bias called
  • survivorship bias.
• And this is where we only see people who make it into power.
• When you think about the people you know who are powerful, those are people who have survived,
  • they've sought power, and
  • they've obtained it, and
  • they've maintained it.
• The people who didn't seek power in the first place,
  • weren't successful in achieving it, or
  • only lasted for a short time,
• those don't show up when we think about powerful people.

Part of their point here seems to be that Pinker is suffering from a form of bias related to the most sensational cases which will tend to heighten the availability bias. (Is there a name for this sort of sensationalism effect?)

Is there also some survivorship bias at play here as well?

We don't have access to a wide statistical survey of dead bodies from a large swath of times and places which makes it difficult to determine actual numbers.