Question

Real life examples (2-3) of servivorship bias.

Answer 1

Survivorship bias is defined as the logical and reasonable error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility.

Examples:

1. Suppose you join a gym and attend it for a few days straight. So, you see the same people who came regularly, and are fit and motivated. So, after a few days you may get a little disappointed as to why you aren't able to stick to your schedule and stay motivated for more than a week, when most people who you saw at the gym could. What you may not notice are the many people who had previously enrolled for gym membership and had stopped turning up for gym just after a week.
2. Quite often, we experience surreal amazement from photographers for getting such "perfectly timed photographs" or even by your photogenic friend who always get such perfect photos. What we don't realize is that these clicks are those that were carefully and naturally selected from 100's (if not 1000's of clicks through trial and error).
3. Sometimes when you hear a new song release, you might think: "Music these days are so horrible. They don't make music like they used to...like in those old days". We compare a new song with the best songs from the previous years and decades, which were themselves so good that they survived the test of time against all competitions and selection process. This is a classic example of Survivorship bias.