Survivorship Bias. The Dangers of Believing Old Smokers
- Stefan Sager
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
The logical error of concentrating on the people or things that "survived" a process while overlooking those that did not because they are not visible.
You read stories about successful entrepreneurs like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, who dropped out of college and became billionaires.
This creates a narrative that dropping out of college can be a viable path to extreme success. This is survivorship bias.
You are seeing the handful of "survivors" while being completely blind to the silent evidence of the millions of people who dropped out of college and did not become successful.

What is Survivorship Bias and how does it explain the "old smoker"?
Survivorship bias is a form of selection bias that dramatically skews our perception of reality.
We study the habits of billionaires and the strategies of winning companies, hoping to find the secrets to success. The problem is that we are ignoring failures and the silent evidence, the thousands of aspiring entrepreneurs who had the same habits but failed.
This is simultaniousely relevant to smoking; when people see a person who lived a long life despite being a heavy smoker, they often ignore the silent evidence of the millions who did not survive the habit.
The most famous example though, is from WWII, where engineers wanted to add armor to bombers. They initially decided to reinforce the areas that were most riddled with bullet holes on the returning planes, until a statistician pointed out that they should be reinforcing the areas with no bullet holes.
The planes hit in those areas were the ones that never made it back; they were the silent failures.
How can I avoid ignoring failures in my decisions?
When studying success, always ask:
What am I not seeing?
Who are the people who tried this and failed?
What is the difference between them and the survivor I am looking at?
This logical error often works alongside The Narrative Fallacy, where we create simple, clean stories about success that ignore all the messy and chaotic details.
We appreciate you subscribing (below) it allows us to:
Publish new Mental Models every week.
Remain 100% independent and ad-free.
Grow our library of resources for the community.
All resources can be found here
Comments