Fooled by the Winners - David Lockwood

Nassim Taleb's book 'Fooled by Randomness' tackles epistemological questions. What do we know, and what do we not know? This is interested in questions like survivor bias, black swan events, and how random noise is subject to human interpretation and given meaning (see: much of business news, possibly journalism, history, finance, academic publishing involving statistics). 

David Lockwood writes a similarly fascinating book, 'Fooled by the Winners' (Winners), which is singularly focused on the question of survivor bias. The cover of the book features a WW2 airplane, engulfed in smoke and falling from the sky, bringing this lovely image to mind:

For a process that generates survivors and non-survivors, we obtain information from survivors without hearing from the non-survivors, which is discussed in Part I of Winners. This discusses survivor bias in anti-aircraft fire, hedge funds returns, the results of academic publishing that hit a threshold for statistical significance, medical trials, and start ups. 

Part II of Winners is concerned with a slightly bigger questions. What happens when we (the knower) are part of the survivor group without direct knowledge of non-survivors? This delves into bigger existential questions, pertaining to whether life is likely to continue on Earth, and Fermi's Paradox, which has to do with our non-observation of extra-terrestrial life. Part II tackles the nuclear crisis, and the bizarre strokes of luck that allowed civilisation to not evaporate in smoke - that we are able to write about this now is precisely survivor bias. 

It is also interested in the question of climate change - that we've managed to alter the climate so much without catastrophe yet is by no means suggestive that we can continue to do so. If a catastrophe did happen, we wouldn't be here to write about it. Past behaviour does not imply future behaviour, and chances are that it might happen anyway. Bummer. 

I enjoyed this book - it was right up my alley, and it was well written with great links between chapters. I have a specific complaint about academia (relating to survivor bias) that I will write about some other time. Until then, happy surviving.