A big thanks to David McRaney of You Are Not So Smart for namechecking me and TOP in his TEDx Talk (at around the 9:30 mark). There goes another minute of my allotted 15 minutes of fame, for sure.
The talk is about Survivor Bias and is excellent, especially if you're not already familiar with the idea. His story about the bomber and the statistician is a great one.
I always think of Survivor Bias when they interview centenarians for the secret of living so long and they say things like "you should smoke a cigar every day" or "I drink one shot of bourbon first thing every morning." We learn a lot more by studying what killed all the people who don't live to 100.
David did a nice job with the talk, too. I wish I could do that. I'm not good at public speaking.
Mike
(Thanks to Doug Nelson)
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Kenneth Tanaka: "'Survivorship bias' is also a hazard in financial market analyses. Someone back-testing an equity investment model, for example, might find themselves inadvertently working with a data set composed only of stocks (companies) that remained in existence throughout the period of the test. Of course this is a rookie error, but the ranks of 'financial analysts' are continuously brimming with shiny new rookies. What's more, easy and relatively inexpensive access to datasets via the Internet often makes it easy to overlook such a pitfall. Fun facts to know and tell."
