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David McRaney / May 23, 2013 / Articles

Survivorship Bias


The Misconception: You should focus on the successful if you wish to

become successful.

The Truth: When failure becomes invisible, the difference between failure
and success may also become invisible.


Illustration by Brad Clark at http://www.plus3video.com

In New York City, in an apartment a dozen blocks west of Harlem, above

trees reaching out over sidewalks and dogs pulling at leashes and
conversations cut short to avoid parking tickets, a group of professional
thinkers once gathered and completed equations that would both snuff

and spare several hundred thousand human lives.

People walking by the apartment at the time had no idea that four stories
above them some of the most important work in applied mathematics was
tilting the scales of a global conflict as secret agents of the United States
armed forces, arithmetical soldiers, engaged in statistical combat. Nor
could people today know as they open umbrellas and twist heels on
cigarettes, that nearby, in an apartment overlooking Morningside Heights,
one of those soldiers once effortlessly prevented the United States military
from doing something incredibly stupid, something that could have
changed the flags now flying in capitals around the world had he not
caught it, something you do every day.

These masters of math moved their families across the country, some
across an ocean, so they could work together. As they unpacked, the
theaters in their new hometowns replaced posters for Citizen Kane with
those for Casablanca, and the newspapers they unwrapped from photo
frames and plates featured stories still unraveling the events at Pearl
Harbor. Many still held positions at universities. Others left those sorts of
jobs to think deeply in one of the many groups that worked for the armed
forces, free of any other obligations aside from checking in on their
families at night and feeding their brains during the day. All paused their
careers and rushed to enlist so they could help crush Hitler, not with guns
and brawn, but with integers and exponents.

The official name for the people inside the apartment was the Statistical
Research Group, a cabal of geniuses assembled at the request of the White
House and made up of people who would go on to compete for and win
Nobel Prizes. The SRG was an extension of Columbia University, and they
dealt mainly with statistical analysis. The Philadelphia Computing
Section, another group made up entirely of women mathematicians,
worked six days a week at the University of Pennsylvania on ballistics
tables. Other groups with different specialties were tied to Harvard,

Princeton, Brown and others, 11 in all, each a leaf at the end of a new
branch of the government created to help defeat the Axis – the
Department of War Math.

Actually…no. They were never officially known by such a deliciously sexy

title. They were instead called the Applied Mathematics Panel, but they
operated as if they were a department of war math.

The Department, ahem, the Panel, was created because the United States
needed help. A surge of new technology had flooded into daily life, and the
same wonders that years earlier drove ticket sales to the World’s Fair were
now cracking open cities. Numbers and variables now massed into
scenarios far too complex to solve with maps and binoculars. The military
realized it faced problems that no soldier had ever confronted. No best
practices yet existed for things like rockets and radar stations and aircraft
carriers. The most advanced computational devices available were clunky
experiments made of telephone switches or vacuum tubes. A calculator
still looked like the mutant child of an old-fashioned cash register and a
mechanical typewriter. If you wanted solutions to the newly
unfathomable problems of modern combat you needed powerful number
crunchers, and in 1941 the world’s most powerful number crunchers ran
on toast and coffee.

Here is how it worked: Somewhere inside the vast machinery of war a

commander would stumble into a problem. That commander would then
send a request to the head of the Panel who would then assign the task to
the group he thought would best be able to resolve the issue. Scientists in
that group would then travel to Washington and meet with top military
personnel and advisors and explain to them how they might go about
solving the problem. It was like calling technical support, except you called
a computational genius who then invented a new way of understanding
the world through math in an effort to win a global conflict for control of

the planet.

For instance, the Navy

desperately needed to know
what was the best possible
pattern, or spread, of
torpedoes to launch against
large enemy ships. All they
had to go on were a series of
hastily taken, blurry, black-
and-white photographs of
turning Japanese war
vessels. The Panel handed
over the photos to one of its
meat-based mainframes and
asked it to report back when
it had a solution. The
warrior mathematicians
solved the problem almost
as soon as they saw it. Lord
Kelvin, they told the Navy,
had already worked out the
Illustration by Brad Clark at http://www.plus3video.com/
calculations in 1887. Just
look at the patterns in the
waves, they explained, see how they fan out in curves like an unfurling
fern? The spaces tell you everything; they give it all away. Work out the
distance between the cusps of the bow waves and you’ll know how fast the
ship is going. Lord Kelvin hadn’t worked out what to do if the ship was
turning, but no problem, they said. The mathematicians scribbled on
notepads and clacked on blackboards until they had both advanced the
field and created a solution. They then measured wavelets on real ships
and saw their math was sound. The Navy added a new weapon to its
arsenal – the ability to accurately send a barrage of torpedoes into a

turning ship based only on what you could divine from the patterns in the
waves.

The devotion of the mathematical soldiers grew stronger as the war grew
bloodier and they learned that the things they etched on hidden
blackboards and jotted on guarded scraps of paper determined who would
and would not return home to their families once the war was over.
Leading brains in every scientific discipline had eagerly joined the fight,
and although textbooks would eventually devote chapters to the work of
the code breakers and the creators of the atomic bomb, there were many
groups whose stories never made headlines that produced nothing more
than weaponized equations. One story in particular was nearly lost
forever. In it, a brilliant statistician named Abraham Wald saved countless
lives by preventing a group of military commanders from committing a
common human error, a mistake that you probably make every single day.

Colleagues described Wald as gentle and kind, and as a genius unsurpassed

in his areas of expertise. His contributions, said one peer, had “produced a
decisive turn in method and purpose” in the social sciences. Born in
Hungary in 1902, the son of a Jewish baker, Wald spent his childhood
studying equations, eventually working his way up through academia to
become a graduate student at the University of Vienna where the great
mathematician Karl Menger mentored him. He was the sort of student
who offered suggestions on how to improve the books he was reading, and
then saw to it those suggestions were incorporated into later editions. His
mentor would introduce Wald to problems that made experts in the field
rub their beards, the sort of things with names like “stochastic difference
equations” and the “betweenness among the ternary relations in metric
space.” Wald would not only return within a month or so with the

solution to such a problem but politely ask for another to solve. As he
advanced the science of probability and statistics, his name became
familiar to mathematicians in the United States where he eventually fled
in 1938, reluctantly, as the Nazi threat grew. His family, all but a single
brother, would later die in the extermination camp known as Auschwitz.

Soon after Wald arrived in the United States he joined the Applied
Mathematics Panel and went to work with the team at Columbia stuffed
in the secret apartment. His group looked for patterns and applied
statistics to problems and situations too large and unwieldy for
commanders to get their arms around. They turned the geometry of air
combat into graphs and charts and they plotted the success rates of bomb
sights and various tactics. As the war progressed, their efforts became
focused on the most pressing problem of the war – keeping airplanes in
the sky.

A B-24 is shot down over an island in the Pacific – Source: http://www.britishpathe.com/

In some years of World War II, the chances of a member of a bomber crew
making it through a tour of duty were about the same as calling heads in a
coin toss and winning. As a member of a World War II bomber crew, you
flew for hours above an entire nation that was hoping to murder you while
you were suspended in the air, huge, visible from far away, and vulnerable
from every direction above and below as bullets and flak streamed out to

puncture you. “Ghosts already,” that’s how historian Kevin Wilson
described World War II airmen. They expected to die because it always felt
like the chances of surviving the next bombing run were about the same as
running shirtless across a football field swarming with angry hornets and
making it unharmed to the other side. You might make it across once, but
if you kept running back and forth, eventually your luck would run out.
Any advantage the mathematicians could provide, even a very small one,
would make a big difference day after day, mission after mission.

As with the torpedo problem, the top brass explained what they knew, and
the Panel presented the problem to Wald and his group. How, the Army
Air Force asked, could they improve the odds of a bomber making it home?
Military engineers explained to the statistician that they already knew the
allied bombers needed more armor, but the ground crews couldn’t just
cover the planes like tanks, not if they wanted them to take off. The
operational commanders asked for help figuring out the best places to add
what little protection they could. It was here that Wald prevented the
military from falling prey to survivorship bias, an error in perception that
could have turned the tide of the war if left unnoticed and uncorrected.
See if you can spot it.

The military looked at the bombers that had returned from enemy
territory. They recorded where those planes had taken the most damage.
Over and over again, they saw that the bullet holes tended to accumulate
along the wings, around the tail gunner, and down the center of the body.
Wings. Body. Tail gunner. Considering this information, where would you
put the extra armor? Naturally, the commanders wanted to put the thicker
protection where they could clearly see the most damage, where the holes
clustered. But Wald said no, that would be precisely the wrong decision.
Putting the armor there wouldn’t improve their chances at all.
Do you understand why it was a foolish idea? The mistake, which Wald

saw instantly, was that the holes showed where the planes were strongest.
The holes showed where a bomber could be shot and still survive the flight
home, Wald explained. After all, here they were, holes and all. It was the
planes that weren’t there that needed extra protection, and they had
needed it in places that these planes had not. The holes in the surviving
planes actually revealed the locations that needed the least additional
armor. Look at where the survivors are unharmed, he said, and that’s
where these bombers are most vulnerable; that’s where the planes that
didn’t make it back were hit.

Taking survivorship bias into account, Wald went ahead and worked out
how much damage each individual part of an airplane could take before it
was destroyed – engine, ailerons, pilot, stabilizers, etc. – and then through
a tangle of complicated equations he showed the commanders how likely
it was that the average plane would get shot in those places in any given
bombing run depending on the amount of resistance it faced. Those
calculations are still in use today.

1944 War Dept US Army Air Forces Training Film – Source: National Archives

The military had the best data available at the time, and the stakes could
not have been higher, yet the top commanders still failed to see the flaws
 g ,y p
in their logic. Those planes would have been armored in vain had it not

been for the intervention of a man trained to spot human error.

A question should be forming in the front of your brain at this point. If the
top brass of the United States armed forces could make such a simple and
dumb mistake while focused on avoiding simple and dumb mistakes,
thanks to survivorship bias, does that mean survivorship bias is likely
bungling many of your own day-to-day assumptions? The answer is, of
course, yes. All the time.

Simply put, survivorship bias is your tendency to focus on survivors

instead of whatever you would call a non-survivor depending on the
situation. Sometimes that means you tend to focus on the living instead of
the dead, or on winners instead of losers, or on successes instead of
failures. In Wald’s problem, the military focused on the planes that made
it home and almost made a terrible decision because they ignored the ones
that got shot down.

It is easy to do. After any process that leaves behind survivors, the non-
survivors are often destroyed or muted or removed from your view. If
failures becomes invisible, then naturally you will pay more attention to
successes. Not only do you fail to recognize that what is missing might
have held important information, you fail to recognize that there is
missing information at all.

You must remind yourself that when you start to pick apart winners and
losers, successes and failures, the living and dead, that by paying attention
to one side of that equation you are always neglecting the other. If you are
thinking about opening a restaurant because there are so many successful
restaurants in your hometown, you are ignoring the fact that only
successful restaurants survive to become examples. Maybe on average 90
percent of restaurants in your city fail in the first year. You can’t see all
those failures because when they fail they also disappear from view. As
Nassim Taleb writes in his book The Black Swan, “The cemetery of failed

restaurants is very silent.” Of course the few that don’t fail in that deadly
of an environment are wildly successful because only the very best and the
very lucky can survive. All you are left with are super successes, and
looking at them day after day you might think it’s a great business to get
into when you are actually seeing evidence that you should avoid it.

Survivorship bias pulls you toward

bestselling diet gurus, celebrity CEOs,
and superstar athletes. It’s an
unavoidable tick, the desire to
deconstruct success like a thieving
magpie and pull away the shimmering
bits. You look to the successful for
clues about the hidden, about how to
better live your life, about how you too
can survive similar forces against
which you too struggle. Colleges and
conferences prefer speakers who shine
as examples of making it through
adversity, of struggling against the
Google’s Larry Page – Source: Fortune
Magazine odds and winning. The problem here is
that you rarely take away from these
inspirational figures advice on what
not to do, on what you should avoid, and that’s because they don’t know.
Information like that is lost along with the people who don’t make it out
of bad situations or who don’t make it on the cover of business magazines
– people who don’t get invited to speak at graduations and
commencements and inaugurations. The actors who traveled from
Louisiana to Los Angeles only to return to Louisiana after a few years
don’t get to sit next to James Lipton and watch clips of their Oscar-
winning performances as students eagerly gobble up their crumbs of
wisdom. In short, the advice business is a monopoly run by survivors. As
the psychologist Daniel Kahneman writes in his book Thinking Fast and

Slow, “A stupid decision that works out well becomes a brilliant decision
in hindsight.” The things a great company like Microsoft or Google or
Apple did right are like the planes with bullet holes in the wings. The
companies that burned all the way to the ground after taking massive
damage fade from memory. Before you emulate the history of a famous
company, Kahneman says, you should imagine going back in time when
that company was just getting by and ask yourself if the outcome of its
decisions were in any way predictable. If not, you are probably seeing
patterns in hindsight where there was only chaos in the moment. He sums
it up like so, “If you group successes together and look for what makes
them similar, the only real answer will be luck.”

If you see your struggle this way, as partly a game of chance, then as
Google Engineer Barnaby James writes on his blog, “skill will allow you to
place more bets on the table, but it’s not a guarantee of success.” Thus, he
warns, “beware advice from the successful.” Entrepreneur Jason Cohen, in
writing about survivorship bias, points out that since we can’t go back in
time and start 20 identical Starbucks across the planet, we can never know
if that business model is the source of the chain’s immense popularity or if
something completely random and out of the control of the decision
makers led to a Starbucks on just about every street corner in North
America. That means you should be skeptical of any book promising you
the secrets of winning at the game of life through following any particular
example.

It might seem disheartening, the fact that successful people probably owe
more to luck than anything else, but only if you see luck as some sort of
magic. Take off those superstitious goggles for a moment, and consider
this: the latest psychological research indicates that luck is a long
mislabeled phenomenon. It isn’t a force, or grace from the gods, or an
enchantment from fairy folk, but the measurable output of a group of
predictable behaviors. Randomness, chance, and the noisy chaos of reality
may be mostly impossible to predict or tame, but luck is something else.

According to psychologist Richard Wiseman, luck – bad or good – is just
what you call the results of a human being consciously interacting with
chance, and some people are better at interacting with chance than others.

Over the course of 10 years, Wiseman

followed the lives of 400 subjects of
all ages and professions. He found
them after he placed ads in
newspapers asking for people who
thought of themselves as very lucky
or very unlucky. He had them keep
diaries and perform tests in addition
to checking in on their lives with
interviews and observations. In one study, he asked subjects to look
through a newspaper and count the number of photographs inside. The
people who labeled themselves as generally unlucky took about two
minutes to complete the task. The people who considered themselves as
generally lucky took an average of a few seconds. Wiseman had placed a
block of text printed in giant, bold letters on the second page of the
newspaper that read, “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this
newspaper.” Deeper inside, he placed a second block of text just as big that
read, “Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win
$250.” The people who believed they were unlucky usually missed both.

Wiseman speculated that what we call luck is actually a pattern of

behaviors that coincide with a style of understanding and interacting with
the events and people you encounter throughout life. Unlucky people are
narrowly focused, he observed. They crave security and tend to be more
anxious, and instead of wading into the sea of random chance open to
what may come, they remain fixated on controlling the situation, on
seeking a specific goal. As a result, they miss out on the thousands of
opportunities that may float by. Lucky people tend to constantly change
routines and seek out new experiences. Wiseman saw that the people who

considered themselves lucky, and who then did actually demonstrate luck
was on their side over the course of a decade, tended to place themselves
into situations where anything could happen more often and thus exposed
themselves to more random chance than did unlucky people. The lucky
try more things, and fail more often, but when they fail they shrug it off
and try something else. Occasionally, things work out.

Wiseman told Skeptical Inquirer magazine that he likened it to setting

loose two people inside an apple orchard, each tasked with filling up their
baskets as many times as possible. The unlucky person tends to go to the
same few spots over and over again, the basket holding fewer apples each
visit. The lucky person never visits the same spot twice, and that person’s
basket is always full. Change those apples to experiences, and imagine a
small portion of those experiences lead to fame, fortune, riches, or some
other form of happiness material or otherwise, and you can see that
chance is not as terrifying as it first appears, you just need to learn how to
approach it.

“
“The harder they looked, the less they saw. And so it is with luck –
unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused
on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding
their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends.
They look through newspapers determined to find certain type of job
advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people
are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than
just what they are looking for.” – Richard Wiseman in an article
written for Skeptical Inquirer
Survivorship bias also flash-freezes your brain into a state of ignorance

from which you believe success is more common than it truly is and
therefore you leap to the conclusion that it also must be easier to obtain.
You develop a completely inaccurate assessment of reality thanks to a
prejudice that grants the tiny number of survivors the privilege of
representing the much larger group to which they originally belonged.

Here is an easy example. Many people believe old things represent a higher
level of craftsmanship than do new things. It’s sort of a “they don’t make
them like they used to” kind of assumption. You’ve owned cars that only
lasted a few years before you had to start replacing them piece by piece,
and, would you look at that, there goes another Volkswagen Beetle
buzzing along like it just rolled off an assembly line. It’s survivorship bias
at work. The Beetle or the Mustang or the El Camino or the VW Minibus
are among a handful of models that survived in large enough numbers to
become iconic classics. The hundreds of shitty car designs and millions of
automobile corpses in junkyards around the world far outnumber the
popular, well-maintained, successful, beloved survivors. According to Josh
Clark at HowStuff Works, most experts say that cars from the last two
decades are far more reliable and safer than the cars of the 1950s and ‘60s,
but plenty of people believe otherwise because of a few high-profile
survivors. The examples that would disprove such assumptions are rusting
out of sight. Do you see how it’s the same as Wald’s bombers? The Beetle
survived, like the bombers that made it home, and it becomes a
representative of 1960s cars because it remains visible. All the other cars
that weren’t made in the millions and weren’t easy to maintain or were
poorly designed are left out of the analysis because they are now removed
from view, like the bombers that didn’t return.

Similarly, photographer Mike Johnston explains on his blog that the

artwork that leaps from memory when someone mentions a decade like
the 1920s or a movement like Baroque is usually made up of things that do
not suck. Your sense of a past era tends to be informed by paintings and
literature and drama that are not crap, even though at any given moment

pop culture is filled with more crap than masterpieces. Why? It isn’t
because people were better artists back in the day. It is because the good
stuff survives, and the bad stuff is forgotten. So over time, you end up with
skewed ideas of past eras. You think the artists of antiquity were amazing
in the same way you associate the music of past decades with the songs
that survived long enough to get into your ears. The movies about
Vietnam never seem to include songs in their soundtracks that sucked.

“
“I have to chuckle whenever I read yet another description of American
frontier log cabins as having been well crafted or sturdily or beautifully
built. The much more likely truth is that 99% of frontier log cabins
were horribly built—it’s just that all of those fell down. The few that
have survived intact were the ones that were well made. That doesn’t
mean all of them were.” – Mike Johnston at The Online Photographer

You succumb to survivorship bias because you are innately terrible with
statistics. For instance, if you seek advice from a very old person about
how to become very old, the only person who can provide you an answer is
a person who is not dead. The people who made the poor health choices
you should avoid are now resting in the earth and can’t tell you about
those bad choices anymore. That’s why it’s difficult not to furrow your
brow and wonder why you keep paying for a gym membership when
Willard Scott showcases the birthday of a 110-year-old woman who claims
the source of her longevity is a daily regimen of cigarillos, cheese sticks,
and Wild Turkey cut with maple syrup and Robitussin. You miss that
people like her represent a very small number of the living. They are on
the thin end of a bell curve. There is a much larger pool of people who
basically drank bacon grease for breakfast and didn’t live long enough to
appear on television. Most people can’t chug bourbon and gravy for a
lifetime and expect to become an octogenarian, but the unusually lucky

handful who can tend to stand out precisely because they are alive and
talking.

The mentalist Derren Brown once

predicted he could flip a coin 10
times in a row and have it come up
heads every time. He then dazzled
UK television audiences by doing
exactly that, flipping the coin into a
bowl with only one cutaway shot
for flair. How did he do it? He
filmed himself flipping coins for
nine hours until he got the result he wanted. He then edited out all the
failures and presented the single success.

Advertisements for weight loss products and fitness regimens operate just
like Derren Brown’s magic trick, by hiding the failures and letting your
survivorship bias do the rest. “Those always use the most positive claims,
the most outrageous examples to sell a product,” Phil Plait, an astronomer
and leading voice in the skeptical movement, explained to me. “When
these things don’t work for the vast majority of customers, you never hear
about it, at least not from the seller.” The people who use the diet, or the
product, or the pill, and fail to lose weight don’t get trotted out for photo
shoots – only the successes do. That same phenomenon has become a
problem in science publications, especially among the younger sciences
like psychology, but it is now under repair. For far too long, studies that
fizzled out or showed insignificant results have not been submitted for
publication at the same level as studies that end up with positive results,
or even worse, they’ve been rejected by prominent journals. Left
unchecked, over time you end up with science journals that only present
the survivors of the journal process – studies showing significance.
Psychologists are calling it the File Drawer Effect. The studies that
disprove or weaken the hypotheses of high-profile studies seem to get

stuffed in the file drawer, so to speak. Many scientists are pushing for the
widespread publication of replication, failure, and insignificance. Only
then, they argue, will the science journals and the journalism that reports
on them accurately describe the world being explored. Science above all
will need to root out survivorship, but it won’t be easy. This particular bias
is especially pernicious, said Plait, because it is almost invisible by
definition. ”The only way you can spot it is to always ask: what am I
missing? Is what I’m seeing all there is? What am I not seeing? Those are
incredibly difficult questions to answer, and not always answerable. But if
you don’t ask them, then by definition you can’t answer them.” He added,
“It’s a pain, but reality can be a tough nut to crack.”

Failure to look for what is missing is a common shortcoming, not just

within yourself but also within the institutions that surround you. A
commenter at an Internet watering hole for introverts called the
INTJForum explained it with this example: when a company performs a
survey about job satisfaction the only people who can fill out that survey
are people who still work at the company. Everyone who might have quit
out of dissatisfaction is no longer around to explain why. Such data
mining fails to capture the only thing it is designed to measure, but unless
management is aware of survivorship bias things will continue to seem
peachy on paper. In finance, this is a common pitfall. The economist Mark
Klinedinst explained to me that mutual funds, companies that offer stock
portfolios, routinely prune out underperforming investments. “When a
mutual fund tells you, ‘The last five years we had 10 percent on average
return,’ well, the companies that didn’t have high returns folded or were
taken over by companies that were more lucky.” The health of the
companies they offer isn’t an indication of the mutual fund’s skill at
picking stocks, said Klinedinst, because they’ve deleted failures from their
offerings. All you ever see are the successes. That’s true for many, many
elements of life. Money experts who made great guesses in the past are
considered soothsayers because their counterparts who made equally risky
moves that failed nosedived into obscurity and are now no longer playing

the game. Whole nations left standing after wars and economic struggles
pump fists of nationalism assuming that their good outcomes resulted
from wise decisions, but they can never know for sure.

“
“Let us suppose that a commander orders 20 men to invade an enemy
bunker. This invasion leads to a complete destruction of the bunker
and only one dead soldier from the 20 person team. An amazingly
successful endeavor. Unless you are the one soldier who was shot
through the head running up the hill. From his standpoint, rapidly
ascending to the spirit world, it seems like a gigantic waste and a
terrible order, but we will never hear his side of things. We will only
hear from the guys who survived, how it was tough going until they
made it over the rise. How it was sad to lose one guy, but they knew
that they would make it. They just had a feeling. Of course, that one
guy had that feeling to, until he felt nothing.” – Unknown author at
spacetravelsacrime.blogspot.com

If you spend your life only learning from survivors, buying books about
successful people and poring over the history of companies that shook the
planet, your knowledge of the world will be strongly biased and
enormously incomplete. As best I can tell, here is the trick: When looking
for advice, you should look for what not to do, for what is missing as Phil
Plait suggested, but don’t expect to find it among the quotes and
biographical records of people whose signals rose above the noise. They
may have no idea how or if they lucked up. What you can’t see, and what
they can’t see, is that the successful tend to make it more probable that
unlikely events will happen to them while trying to steer themselves into
the positive side of randomness. They stick with it, remaining open to
better opportunities that may require abandoning their current paths, and
that’s something you can start doing right now without reading a single

self-help proverb, maxim, or aphorism. Also, keep in mind that those who
fail rarely get paid for advice on how not to fail, which is too bad because
despite how it may seem, success boils down to serially avoiding
catastrophic failure while routinely absorbing manageable damage.

Before we depart, I’d like

to mention Wald one more time. Like
many of the others who joined the armed
services to fight Hitler with numbers,
Abraham Wald went down in history,
but not for the bombers and bullet holes
story. He is best remembered as the
inventor of sequential analysis, another
achievement he earned while working in
the department of war math. He married
Lucille Land in 1941. Two years later they
had their first child, Betty, followed four
years later by another they named
Robert. Three years after that, at the top
Abraham Wald – Source: Prof. Konrad
of his career and enjoying an exotic Jacobs
speaking tour, after saving the lives of
thousands of people he would never
meet, he and Lucille died in an airplane that crashed against the side of
the Nilgiri mountains in India. Perhaps there is an irony to that,
something about airplanes and odds and chance and luck, but it isn’t the
interesting part of Wald’s story. His contributions to science are what
survives his time on Earth and the parts of his tale that will endure.

In 1968, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report saying the

application of mathematics in World War II “became recognized as an
art,” and the lessons learned by the mathematicians were later applied to
business, science, industry, and management. They saved the world and

then rebuilt it using the same tools each time – calculators and chalk.

In 1978, Allen Wallis, Director of SRG said of his team, “This was surely the
most extraordinary group of statisticians ever organized.” The bomber
problem was just a side story for them, a funny anecdote that only
surfaced in the 1980s as they all began to reminisce full time. When you
think of how fascinating the story is, it makes you wonder about the
stories we’ll never hear about those numerical soldiers because they never
made it out of the war and into a journal, magazine, or book, and how
that’s true of so much that’s important in life. All we know of the past
passes through a million, million filters, and a great deal is never recorded
or is tossed aside to make room for something more interesting or
beautiful or audacious. All we will learn from history reaches us from the
stories that, for whatever reason, survived.

I wrote a whole book full of articles like this one: You

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Go deeper into understanding just how deluded you

really are and learn how you can use that knowledge to
be more humble, better connected, and less dumb in the
sequel to the internationally bestselling You Are Not So Smart. Watch the
beautiful new trailer here.

Sources

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 Association, The American Statistical. “Resolution in Honor of
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Bodanis, David. E=mc2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous

Equation. Penguin, 2004.

—. Einstein the Nobody. 11 October 2005. 15 January 2013

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Clark, Josh. Are modern cars less problematic? 22 March 2013

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/under-the-hood/diagnosing-car-
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Cohen, Jason. Business Advice Plagued by Survivor Bias. 17 August 2009.

15 January 2013 http://blog.asmartbear.com/business-advice-plagued-
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Podcast


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 Wilson, Kevin. Men of Air: The Doomed Youth of Bomber Command.
Orion, 2007.

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Wolverton, M. (2011). Girl Computers. Retrieved May 2013, from

http://www.americanheritage.com/content/girl-computers

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