[19/26] Survivor
This story is part of the A-Z challenge that I’m doing.
Optimism is a weird thing. It keeps hope and faith alive inside us even when a rational mind would have given up already. It feeds on the stories that we keep telling ourselves. It feeds on the stories that are told to us by this world. It feeds on the stories on the stories that are told by survivors. The survivors may be actual people, as in a medical study, or could be companies or research subjects or applicants for a job, or anything that must make it past some selection process to be considered further.
Every day, we run into survivors of some sort, and on listening to their stories we tend to believe in things that don’t exist. Imagine three out of five students get selected to pursue their graduation in one of the top universities in the country. What if I tell you that those three students who got selected came from the same high school?
Will you tend to believe that the high school provided the kind of education that helped students get selected in the top universities? Most people tend to believe so, without considering the thousand of students who studied from the same high school but weren’t selected in any of the top universities. If you consider only the winners from the whole of the sample space, you’ve picked the biased dataset and a biased dataset will always yield biased results — sometimes resulting in the optimism. This is called Survivor Bias.
We tend to ignore the losers who make up the majority of the dataset and make ourselves fall into the trap of, “if I do exactly what the winners did, I’ll get exactly what they got”. There were thousands of other people who “did exactly what the survivors did, but didn’t get what the survivors got”.
Optimism is also a good thing, besides being weird. I am all for the optimism, but lately, I’ve realized there could be sources of false optimism. Whenever I feel optimism, I try to identify the source and if it turns out to be the survivors’ stories, I keep that false optimism from getting on my head. Only the optimism that comes from within, without your realizing, is the one that counts.
