Survivor Bias

What Hacker News said

Strong rec sillysaurus3 · 2018-08 · on “The Absurdity of Detecting Gravitational Waves (2017) [video]”

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: [this video]

Cites ThinkerR · 2016-08 · on “Breaking a myth: Data shows you don’t actually need a co-founder”

Makes me think of the survivor bias episode of Veritaseum [this video] or the french caster ScienceEtonnante on the Simpson Paradox [LINK] [LINK]

Cites pdkl95 · 2018-02 · on “EFI Sucks (2012)”

> my primary source of linus news comes from articles It's easy to fall into survivorship bias[1] when "news" is your only exposure to a topic. You are only seeing the extreme events that were "newsworthy". > why should i care to seek out more about one who i find is well known to throw e-mail tantrums Do you want to have an accurate understanding of reality or the distorted view limited to whatever was sensational/scandalous enough to be "newsworthy"? When knowledge is derived only from the extreme cases that make headlines, people start to believe inaccurate generalization like "black people are criminals", "Muslims are terrorists", or "gamers are antisocial nerds that might shoot up a sch

Cites pdkl95 · 2018-04 · on “The Price of Free Is Actually Too High”

I currently live on SSDI due to unfortunate medical problems that made driving impossible. Three doctors independently looked at a particular lab result and said, "How are you still alive?". (Previously I had a decent engineering salary writing embedded firmware) SSDI pays very close to the federal poverty level. Even with the benefit of receiving Medicare, the monthly cost of very-necessary medication plus very frugal living expenses usually leaves me with up to ~$(40 +/- 40) each month in "discretionary spending" that I can use to buy anything beyond rent/medication/food. (e.g. clothes, household cleaning/repair/etc, very rarely travel expenses) I'm lucky that my interest has always involv

Cites pdkl95 · 2018-09 · 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

Cites sillysaurusx · 2021-05 · 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: [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

Cites stevenjgarner · 2022-06 · on “I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)”

IMHO, this was not cheating. This is a phenomenon called success. If you are fortunate (?) to be around in the entrepreneurial world long enough, you will realize that intelligence, hard work, good time management etc are not adequate. They just qualify as deserving. There are serendipities that separate those who succeed from everybody else who was deserving. Survivor bias [1]. Calling Eli was your serendipity. The opposite is also true: killer asteroids hit the planets of otherwise deserving individuals and initiatives. I was co-founder of a municipal fiber-to-the-home initiative in 1996. We had both a winning technical recipe and also a financial engineering recipe. (Extremely rare even t