Don't underestimate the impact of survivorship bias on your beliefs

Similar how hard it is to accurately Consider side effectsConsider side effects
Here's an example of a side effect: Every place on earth has unsafe levels of plastic in the rainwater.

Seems bad. How do we do less of this?

When considering a change, especially a technolog...
in practice, it's impossible to compensate for the impact of survivorship bias.

Even if you spent all your waking moments consuming stories of failure you'd still be exposed to a disproportionate number of anecdotes, data, and spurious reasoning about how the successful got where they are.

"Actively and aggressively discounting all success stories as meaningless noise" sounds extreme, but it's the best you can do. (And it's still not enough.)

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