I quite often read some business related blogs or books and they are full of smart, energetic, sound and at the same time absolutely unfounded advices.
Just couple of examples: a book Good to Great or TAD talk, Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action
It usually goes something like this: “Let’s look on these three supersuccessful companies: Apple, Google, Facebook. All of them were founded by people who truly believed in changing the world. That means that to be successful all you need is a desire to change the world. And everybody who doesn’t believe in this will forever stay pimply, asocial and poor dummy’.
That’s exactly a Survivor bias. We get several “survivors” (several big companies) and disregard everybody else (all those other companies which failed and which were start by people who wanted to change the world too). Also, we disregard companies which become successful and which were started by people with different mindset.
So, all these advices try to imply some causation, when they don’t even properly prove correlation.
BTW. Here are several people who wrote about this problem too: Business Advice Plagued by Survivor Bias, Rails, Scrum, CMMI and Survivor Bias.
It seems like there is yet another bias (not discovered) – find biases anywhere, even if there is no one )
Just because I am biased doesn’t mean that they’re not biased too 🙂