Business advice plagued by survivor bias (2009)

After 80% of the article explains survivor bias, we finally get to the subject (business advice), and this is the gripe:<p>&gt; It turns out Jim started by combing through 1435 companies looking for good candidates for the book, and picked eleven.<p>This to not survivor bias! Call it selection bias if you want, but it&#x27;s plain old data manipulation!

It’s good to be aware of survivor bias but the discussion around it has been overdone and leads to pointless defeatism.<p>The airplane example is the canonical example but also ironic because it’s an example where there was a ton to learn from survivors. Their first takeaway was logically inconsistent but eventually they realized that places without bullet holes were the most important to armor. Because planes shot in other places survived. If no planes survived they’d learn nothing but instead they learned something useful from the survivors.<p>It doesn’t change that a WW2 fighter pilot would need some luck to survive but if he took the right lessons from survivors and armored his plane in the correct places he’d improve his probability of surviving.<p>One of my favorite pieces of business advice is since 90% of businesses fail, start 10 businesses and you’ll probably succeed. Of course that oversimplifies things but so does the original statistic . It’s also useful advice that helps you re-frame “luck” as stochastic risk that you can manage. And learning ways to lower probability of failure is a great way to manage risk even if there’s always some element of randomness at play.

A shower thought I had recently is that we should start referring to &quot;Business cases&quot; as &quot;Survival cases&quot; and &quot;Business books&quot; as &quot;Survival books&quot; and that makes the inherent bias so much clearer.

When I first found Jason&#x27;s blog, I was surprised not to see it posted here more frequently. Many of his old posts ring just as true today as a decade ago, and his writings about the personal aspects of startup life are unlike most of what you find written by successful founders.

Most advice has bias. Of course the people giving business advice want to talk about their successes. Just like the people on social media post how perfect their lives are.<p>It&#x27;s especially interesting to hear advice from people who lack empathy. Maybe high performers giving advice to someone with a disability. Or someone who got lucky that credits their hard work and denies luck had anything to do with it.<p>I&#x27;m tired of it. I&#x27;ll look at some advice just for curiosity, but I&#x27;m done trying. What happens, happens. No point in repeatedly wasting effort.

Related:<p><i>Business Advice Plagued by Survivor Bias</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4314107">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4314107</a> - July 2012 (1 comment)<p><i>Business Advice Plagued by Survivor Bias</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=768297">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=768297</a> - Aug 2009 (36 comments)

Why didn&#x27;t the RAF just preemptively shoot holes in the locations of those red dots to make their planes more likely to survive?

I&#x27;ve built quite a few apps and web pages that ultimately failed primarily due to not having a client. To take a lesson from my failures, always make sure you have a client.

You hear about failure case studies too. I think it&#x27;s more of a selection bias, or a narrative bias: they pick case studies that prove a point, the same way you look for and cite statistics and articles to support the point you were already going to make in an internet fight, rather than trying to represent the entire complexity of the domain you&#x27;re squabbling in.

If you want to be a pop star, is it better to get advice from Taylor Swift, or your local garage band getting high school gigs?

We can learn from failures if we really want.<p>For example, see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.failory.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.failory.com</a>

Good advice doesn&#x27;t stop being good just because people stop following it. Ultimately success is a matter of effort.

Ehh, you should always take general business advice for what it is. It is usually not a great idea to treat them as gospel given that for every best-practice, there is an exception. Instead, realize that some things are (probably) necessary but not sufficient for success. Also, try to understand why the recommended approaches succeeded. That way, you can examine for yourself if that particular bromide applies to your situation.

This seems overly reductive. Why would you want to take business advice from people who weren&#x27;t able to build a sustainable business. I get that starting a business is fraught with risk and there are factors outside your control that can impact, but the reasoning on this seems to basically boil down to. &quot;There is nothing you can do to be successful and everything is at the arbitrary whims of fate.&quot;<p>Or to put it about another aspect<p>&quot;Career advice plagued by survivorship bias.&quot; That souns equally stupid.