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🦉   The famous survivorship bias image is a "loose reconstruction" of methods used on a hypothetical dataset

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Published on September 30, 2025 1:13 PM GMTFile:Survivorship-bias.svg - Wikimedia CommonsA later reprinting of the "unillustrated report" referenced:A_Reprint_Plane_Vulnerability.pdfEven a 20mm autocannon round only has a ~50% chance of destroying a plane on an engine hit, as opposed to the ~100% assumption used for the illustration (I think the flak round statistics were per-fragment-hit and not per-shell)! Weird how few people were suspicious about a 100% loss rate for engine hits to a two-engine plane.Speaking of which, there is no source for the example data, which is noted as "hypothetical" in the report. The hypothetical data set was for a 1000-plane raid on a single objective, which implies a strategic bombing mission context, and thus that the planes ...

LessWrong     Sep 30, 2025