幸存者偏差 | Will Li’s 知识空间

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历史是由胜利者书写的

A major problem with historiography – our interpretation of the past – is that history is famously written by the victors. We do not see what Nassim Taleb calls the “silent grave” – the lottery ticket holders who did not win.

Thus, we over-attribute success to things done by the successful agent rather than to randomness or luck, and we often learn false lessons by exclusively studying victors without seeing all of the accompanying losers who acted in the same way but were not lucky enough to succeed.

非常重要的问题是历史是由胜利者书写的。我们看不到纳西姆·塔勒布所说的“寂静的坟墓”——那些没有中奖的彩票持有者。因此，我们过度地将成功归因于成功代理人所做的事情，而不是随机性或运气，并且我们经常通过专门研究胜利者而没有看到所有以相同方式行事但不够幸运的失败者，来吸取错误的教训。

看到了成功者的结果，一定是因为其行为导致的吗？

Action 行动

马云语录：成功路径千千万，失败就那么几种？？这个或许跟逆向思维也有异曲同工之处，涉及到行动的话

Learning from the successful is a much deeper problem and can reduce the probability of success more than we might imagine. 从成功者学习会降低成功的概率，比想象预期中降低的程度会更大

Examining the lives of successful entrepreneurs teaches us very little. We would do far better to analyze the causes of failure, then act accordingly. Even better would be learning from both failures and successes.

审视成功企业家的生活，我们能学到的东西很少。我们会更好地分析失败的原因，然后采取相应的行动。更好的是从失败和成功中学习。

Consider What You Don’t See 考虑你看不到的东西

Don’t look just at what you can see. Consider all the things that started on the same path but didn’t make it. Try to figure out their story, as there is as much, if not more, to be learned from failure.

不要只看你能看到的东西。想想所有在同一条道路上开始但没有成功的事情。试着弄清楚他们的故事，因为从失败中可以学到很多，甚至更多。

Considering survivorship bias when presented with examples of success is difficult. It is not instinctive to pause, reflect, and think through what the base rate odds of success are and whether you’re looking at an outlier or the expected outcome. And yet if you don’t know the real odds, if you don’t know if what you’re looking at is an example of survivorship bias, then you’ve got a blind spot.

出于本能，并不会停下来、反思和思考成功的基本几率是多少，以及你看到的是异常值还是预期结果。然而，如果你不知道真正的基本胜率，如果你不知道你所看到的是否是幸存者偏差的例子，那么你就会遇到盲点。

Whenever you read about a success story in the media, think of all the people who tried to do what that person did and failed. Of course, understanding survivorship bias isn’t an excuse for not taking action, but rather an essential tool to help you cut through the noise and understand the world. If you’re going to do something, do it fully informed.

每當你在媒體上讀到一個成功的故事時，想想所有試圖做那個人做過但失敗的人。当然，理解幸存者偏见并不是不采取行动的借口，而是帮助您消除噪音并了解世界的重要工具。如果你要做某事，那就在充分知情的情况下去做。

应该做的行动

带入场景中，思考一下做过但失败的人的场景代入 → 研究基本胜率（先验概率） → 似然函数加降权 → 得到后验概率并根据调整去行动

Personal Thoughts ‣

让我想起了，分析的道理是没有问题的。但对于我来说，并非是从零开始的，有过相关经验和行业资源，能筛选出相对优质的供应商，共享行业经验和运营技巧、管理模式等，是在此基础上往前行动。但对于岑哥来说，一个绝对新的领域从头开始，反而成为了劣势和掣肘的点。迷茫也是理所当然、毫无疑问的吧。因为看见而相信，要看到足够潜在收益才会投入，这点也没任何问题。是压力但当然也是动力，多行动往前推进吧。

同时关于幸存者偏差，也没问题，应该要先找到基本胜率是多少，测试跑出来再去做决策和加杠杆等

关于Base rates基本胜率

Mental Model: Bias from Conjunction Fallacy

As typified by the "Linda" problem, we're all subject to the Conjunction Fallacy, where we regularly violate the laws of probability due to a vivid story.

https://fs.blog/bias-conjunction-fallacy/

跟NPV净现值的逻辑一致，要胜过市场资金使用成本的利率，获取超额收益，不能被眼前的非加权利益蒙蔽，要清晰认知到市场和现状，也是一种商业上的活在当下。