While covering a Nov. 10 protest led by @copsoutofNU, I spoke to an Evanston resident who experienced an easy relationship between EPD and Evanston residents. He put NIPAS in a different category, saying they appeared "dangerous." 🧵:

Survivorship Bias 101

History is written by the victors. But if we exclusively focus on these successes, we allow survivorship bias to distort our understanding of the world.

But what is "survivorship bias" and how does it work?

Here's Survivorship Bias 101!

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1/ First, a few definitions.

Survivorship bias is the logical error of concentrating on survivors (successes) and ignoring casualties (failures).

When we do so, we miss the true "base rates" of survival (the actual probability of success) and arrive at flawed conclusions.

2/ When we completely ignore failures, we lose our ability to correctly identify the differences between successes and failures.

Put simply, exclusively focusing on successes may actually inhibit our ability to identify (and replicate) the actions that led to such success.

3/ Cicero wrote on the topic over 2,000 years ago.

An atheist named Diagoras is shown portraits of people who prayed and were saved from death at sea as proof of God's existence.

Diagoras replies, "I see those who were saved, but where are those painted who were shipwrecked?"

4/ Cicero cuts right to the point - we cannot conclude that prayer led to being saved from the sea if we ignore those who prayed and then drowned.

Survivorship bias can lead to a deeply-flawed understanding of cause-and-effect relationships.

Let's look at some examples.

On December 25 Mr Pool retweeted August 16 message about the Phoenix and that the worst was still on the horizon to come. 1/*

Maybe now we can assume that November 3 message meant "FUD" nor "FUN". Putting the word in capital letters seems to indicate the aspect the word fud has in our space, FUD. 2/*

Brad started it on December 22 (1/3 posts (Don't say? Sure) = 13 = Plan B). 3/*

And immediately the SEC followed dropping the bomb (1.3 billions (Don't say? Sure) = 13 = Plan B). 4/*

FUD materializes, Bitstamp is one of the first that haltes XRP trading and so on. 5/*

The public supports less policing and prisons but Harper invested in social discord.

Policing, Prison and construction were linked under the Harper Government.

Richard Bird was VP of Enbridge and he also served as a member of the Canada's Federal Minister of Finance's Advisory Committee on Financing and currently serves as chairman of the board of directors of the Alberta Investment Management

Richard Bird, a former VP of Enbridge is linked to Ecopatrol, missing money and a massive sex scandal in Colombia and Prison Schemes with bid rigging, corruption and collusion.

There was bid rigging corruption and collusion during Prime Minister Harper's term as they invested in private prisons across Canada. Read here. This mentions Bird Construction Inc. Richard Bird was VP of Enbridge Pipeline Inc.