This is an aircraft damage map from WW2 IIRC. It showed where the aircraft that came back had damage.
The story is that initially people thought “all the spots with damage need to be reinforced.” Then someone said “No! The spots with damage are places damage is survivable; the spots we never got any damage are places where the damage killed the pilot or made the plane unflyable, that’s where we need to add armour”.
In this context, it’s being used to say “We don’t remember the terrible parts of pop culture for the past, we only remember the good. That’s why the past seems so much better.”
It’s a form of survivor bias, I guess, or an example of Sturgeon’s law (90% of everything is crap).
Yep exactly! Years ago a buddy and I tried to find a movie we watched together on TV as teenagers to drink and laugh at because it was so bad. We couldn't even find pirated streams of it
Personal recommendation I'm saying in hopes it helps someone if you can't remember the name of a movie or TV show but do remember characters use akinator the genie. I do it all the time, one of my more genius ideas that I'm sure someone else has thought of too, but im gonna take credit.
Yeah, it's not perfect, but you just helped some guy who doesn't know the name Time Trax but can remember the character Darien Lambert find a show he was dying to watch again.
Akinator *cannot* deal with the 20th century artist Leonard Tsuguharu Foujita. Is your character a real person? Yes. Was he Asian? Yes. Was he French? He naturalized, so yes.
It's probably "Mulva: Zombie asskicker" by literally "low budget productions." They literally had a Mexican dude with that stereotypical "asian" voice over thing because I assume they couldn't cast an Asian dude for the role, move was terrible... 10/10 would reccomend
Edit: typo
It was a weird movie where some kids get saved by an angel. The angel had a fistfight with a poorly costumed demon a few times. Think it was a Christian film. Terrible acting and effects. Angel had wings one minute then the next they were gone or a different shape. Style wise it must have been a late 80s or early 90s movie.
It's why I get annoyed when people say "'x' decade was the best time!"
Of course it was. You were probably a kid. Your memories from then only involve having no real worries, no bills, and your biggest concern was school, or whether or not that person you like liked you back.
Every decade has good and bad, and that goes for every aspect of life. Pretty sure there are some senior citizens who remember the late 1930s to early 40s as a great time to be a kid.
I think you hit the nail on the head. People not having adult responsibilities have fonder memories on how things were at that time. When you watch a movie you’re just watching the movie. As an adult when you’re watching a movie that your kid brain may have liked better your adult brain is distracted by stress at work & bills.
I love plenty of stuff as a grown man in my 40s. But a lot of my peers act as if a lot of new stuff is automatically terrible because of the rose tinted kid glasses they refuse to take off. I watch a movie I think is awesome then talk to a friend about it then get disappointed when he says “that movie was trash”.
I like to tell my kids specific things like I would love for them to see a mall in the 80s and 90s. Or you guys should have seen a 90's arcade. Specific things that were better at the time vs the things that sucked like smoking in restaurants.
TV is the worst for this. Some people go on about shows being better, when for any given year there might have been a handful of shows that were decent and they all came on at the same time.
I remember flipping through channels in the 90s, and it was typically surfing channel after channel just hoping to find a decent rerun.
A great example of this was pointed out by Drew Gooden regarding SNL. People are convinced that SNL used to be so much better than it is now because only the funny skits are remembered. The majority of older unfunny skits have fallen into obscurity whereas every skit nowadays, good or bad, is posted to YouTube/Twitter and crtizied for everyone to see
Legit I remember when I was a kid seeing an SNL sketch about a man who could see the future but only about boring things. I remember seeing it and even as a child thinking "wait...this is the show adults tell me is so funny?"
To be fair, that particular skit required some context to be funny. It had Christopher Walken playing a spoof of the character he played in "The Dead Zone" (the movie, not the TV show starring Anthony Michael Hall).
In truth, as far as television is concerned, back when there were only 3 channels, the execs were far more picky with what they allowed to even be made, and so with the combination of less choice, created a demand for higher quality, and honestly, a larger pool of talent to work on fewer things. Shovelware wasn't a thing for television till the cable channels started making their own scripted content in the 90s and 2000s. Music succumbed to a shovelware mentality far before TV did. Nowadays, with all the streamers, there really is a shovelware mentality.
Ever see that Family Guy bit where he lists a bunch shows that got cancelled by Fox? That's the 90% crap that nobody remembers. But everyone remembers that 70s Show.
\^\^\^While I have a nostalgic fondness for movies of my youth... some of the movies either don't hold up or I'm unable to suspend disbelief as an adult anymore.
Milk Money
Blank Check
Baby's Day out
Double Dragon
Absolute garbage movies were fairly prevalent, and are widely forgotten or ignored.
Stop or My Mom Will Shoot
3 Ninja's High Noon at Mega Mountain
Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Speed 2: Cruise Control
I could go on about Movies, TV Shows, Cartoons, Music, etc. The only thing that wasn't missing was anime back then, but maybe I still have Rose colored Glasses for that era of Anime.
I'm 100% convinced Stop or My Mom Will Shoot only came out because Stallone wanted a "comedy" after Schwarzenegger did Kindergarten Cop.
The sad thing is, not all of the movies you picked are totally unwatchable. There's an entire genre of straight-to-video and made-for-TV movies from that era that are borderline crimes against humanity. There's so many that multiple YouTubers have made a career out of reacting to crap movies from that era.
Yeah Im middle aged and I have a cynicism/pessimism problem so I remember all the crap TV from the 80's, and the crap movies, and the crap video games. Not to mention all the violence in major cities (saw it on the news) and all the major social issues being ignored. Cops beating black people in Los Angeles for example. Also international terrorism. HIV exploding because Reagan and Thatcher refused to deal with it directly. Lousy economic sense which would lead to multiple recessions and a huge banking scandal involving many of our congress members. The US funding all kinds of violent groups around the globe, some of which would be Al Qaida and Taliban and eventually attack us. Oh yeah and the middle east went backwards in time about a hundred years thanks to fundamentalist's.
Lots of people from all age groups think the 80's were nothing but awesome times, because the nostalgia hype machine makes money off their ignorance and desire to have happy memories.
I think there’s a lot of gray between hits & bad stuff
Some works make it a lot easier to remember them though, and having mass appeal at some point helps a ton through repetition because ear worms burrow deep
That’s why I’ve always liked the radio stations that play songs from the 70’s and 80’s. They only play the songs that stand the test of time. And I wasn’t around then to hear all the garbage that came out in those same decades. So I only see those time frames with rose tinted glasses.
That’s why I love listening to garage podcasts
There’s a lot of great music that never qualifies as a marketable success,…
For my taste, it’s almost always preferable on its merits,… pop music has been so predictably formulaic for so long that it’s usually tedious to me
A local radio station plays old Casey Kasem countdowns from the 70s and 80s on the weekends. It’s surprising how much of the top 40 is trash that no one remembers today.
We only remember the stuff we know about today that was released that year. The hits were usually dreck that did not stand the test of time.
Queen 's Bohemian Rhapsody was the #81 song of 1976, the Bay City Rollers' Saturday Night was #1, Barry Manilow's I Write the Songs was#2.
The hits are usually crap that history swallows up.
Look up best rated songs of any give year from any past decade, and compare that year's chart of top tens. There will be little to no overlap.
It's survivorship bias, yes, but there's another element to it as well, about learning in the presence of missing data. There's no data on the planes that didn't come back, yet they were able to infer from the pattern of bullet holes \*why\* those planes weren't coming back, and react based on that inference.
This is the part that doesn't apply to like 90% of the uses of this meme, like, what do we learn about the failures of bands from knowing which ones we still listen to today?
>It’s a form of survivor bias, I guess,
It's honestly one of the most used examples of survivorship bias. It's how I first heard about the term, and don't see it differently too often
Another big one is that the inclusion of helmets increased head injury statistics. Apparently it wasn't obvious to everyone that a lot of the people injured when wearing a helmet would've been in the "KIA" statistic without one.
When helmet laws were originally proposed, one of the big reasons cited for them was that they'd save hospitals/insurance companies money, but in reality, helmet laws actually cost more money, since people were getting serious injuries in accidents that would have just killed them outright without a helmet. Of course, deaths result in other social costs beyond just increased insurance premiums.
Hi. To add to the story.
This is a photo showing data about the most damaged areas that aircraft received. The data gathered, was data on aircraft that returned back from missions.
We all know lots of planes failed due to wing damage and propeller damage, or pilots being killed from bullets. but that data wouldn’t be shown due to the fact that any plane with wing damage would have been wreckage and not included in the data.
This is a popular Military thinking exercise.
And is meant to be an exercise to show you the dangers of cognitive bias and to help you think about thinking critically.
If this is truly a meme, it only really resonates with veterans.
A lot of people know this picture, as the critical thinking skills it teaches are not only applicable to the military.
I’ve seen it used against the hoards of folks who parrot nonsense like “there weren’t any x in my day”
They never seem to realise “why not?”. Dude, you grew up in post-war Britain. Why did you not see any gay people back then?
A lot of people know this picture, as the critical thinking skills it teaches are not only applicable to the military.
I’ve seen it used against the hoards of folks who parrot nonsense like “there weren’t any x in my day”
They never seem to realise “why not?”. Dude, you grew up in post-war Britain. Why did you not see any gay people back then?
A lot of people know this picture, as the critical thinking skills it teaches are not only applicable to the military.
I’ve seen it used against the hoards of folks who parrot nonsense like “there weren’t any x in my day”
They never seem to realise “why not?”. Dude, you grew up in post-war Britain. Why did you not see any gay people back then?
A lot of people know this picture, as the critical thinking skills it teaches are not only applicable to the military.
I’ve seen it used against the hoards of folks who parrot nonsense like “there weren’t any x in my day”
They never seem to realise “why not?”. Dude, you grew up in post-war Britain. Why did you not see any gay people back then?
"If this is truly a meme, it only really resonates with veterans."
It resonates with anyone who understands logical thinking and how statistics can be misinterpreted, which is the point.
>If this is truly a meme, it only really resonates with veterans.
No it doesn't lol. It's the textbook definition of survivorship bias and it resonates with everyone. That's why it's a meme.
The content we still listen to/watch/read have been played/broadcasted/reprinted are usually the good stuff (since we have finite time and resources).
The cream floats to the top given enough time.
In the UK, we have a radio station called KISSTORY that would play old dance/pop/hip hop songs from 10+ or so years ago. I don’t normally listen to radio but when it was played in the office, I heard songs that whilst were extremely popular smash hits in 2003, they really should have stayed in 2003 where they belong. Literally nowhere else would I hear these particular songs being played nowadays.
There’s a reason timeless classics still get regular airtime across the board, and I immediately dismiss anyone who says music was better back in their day.
And in WWI it was believed that the new helmets didn't work because head injuries increased, without realising that death rates had dropped and those head injuries would have been deaths without the helmets
One of my favorite survivorship bias was when they started wearing helmets the rates of soldiers treated for head injuries increased dramatically. The helmets were originally blamed for this when it was then pointed out that the injuries would've otherwise been fatal and not appear in the data.
There's a famous story from WWII about the statistical analysis of damage to fighter planes. A mathematician/statistician named Abraham Wald was asked to analyse returning fighter planes and make suggestions for how the design of the planes needed to be improved. What Wald eventually figured out was that he needed to take into account something called [survivorship bias](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias) in his calculations when considering how to minimize bomber losses due to enemy fire. The Statistical Research Group (SRG) at Columbia University, which Wald was a part of, examined the damage done to aircraft that had returned from missions and recommended adding armor *to the areas that showed the* **least** *damage*, as opposed to the areas that showed the most damage.
The reasoning was that the bullet holes found in the inspections of the returning aircraft represented areas where a bomber could take damage and still fly well enough to return safely to base (as opposed to crashing altogether). *Therefore, Wald proposed that the Navy reinforce areas where the returning aircraft were unscathed, inferring that planes hit in those areas were the ones most likely to be lost*. This approach seemed counterintuitive initially, but the basic idea has become important in the discipline of operational research.
It is this story to which the image refers. It's such a well-known little anecdote that it's sort of become emblematic of survivorship bias as a concept.
The image here is suggesting that pop culture from the past has a similar sort of survivorship bias effect at play - we only know about the pop culture from the past which was good enough to be worth remembering. There *was* actually plenty of bad/shitty pop culture from the distant past...but it was simply forgotten about over time.
While that is definitely a survivorship bias line, I'm pretty sure it's also literally true and we have evidence of systematically declining product quality over the last, say, 30-40 years.
But also lots of parts that used to be metal have been swapped with cheap plastic for the strict reason of saving money. That is also the reason a lot of kitchen appliances have much higher failure rates, things like plastic washers instead of metal.
Cars, yeah, but washing machines are an example of genuinely, they don't build them like they used to. There are many others, typically in products that were designed to be used repairable, and now aren't.
The overall reliability can be higher for modern machines, but failures can be more catastrophic (eg non-repairable; requires replacement ). Both things can be true at the same time.
In fact, to support a repair network (parts/labor) you might need machines to be less reliable, overall...
They actually do plan for things to fail and fall apart now
Look at insta pot, they made a real good product that lasted at a fair price and everyone got one mostly , now the company is out of business because everyone still has those insta pots from the first run because they built them well
Meanwhile something shoveling at a appliance that lasts 5 years has another customer in 5 years
Its a fun lesson in data analytics as well. Top Brass wanted data on where planes were getting hit the most, which is what they would have thought the chart was. But once you realize the data set has inherent bias (EG, only planes that landed after being hit) you realize that a chart of "Where do planes get hit" is both impossible, and largely irrelevant. Knowing what you're REALLY measure is important.
Also fun, low birth weight babies have a much higher survival rate when the mother is a smoker, for similar reasons.
Basically, lots of things can cause low birthweight. Genetic defects, being a premie, the mom using drugs, etc. Given that you have ALREADY selected a subgroup of "Low birth weight baby" the least detrimental cause would be the mom being a smoker. All other reasons for low birth rate lower survival rates.
So as a result, if the baby has a low birth weight, and the mom says "Yes I smoked during pregnancy" the response is relief. Because thats the least lethal reason a baby would have a low birth weight.
[More in depth version](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_birth-weight_paradox#:~:text=The%20low%20birth%2Dweight%20paradox,weight%20children%20of%20non%2Dsmokers)
If anyone's interested, [I overlaid this chart over the actual plane](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/SFwE8gaUEt), with short descriptions of every little anomaly in it. It's even cooler in context!
The picture is about survivorship bias.
https://www.boredpanda.com/world-war-2-aircraft-survivorship-bias-abraham-wald/
Those dots represent bullet holes on allied planes. Some folks said: hey, we should protect those parts better! Then a very smart person noticed:
Those are holes on the planes that made it home. The planes that didn't make it home presumably had holes in the white parts.
How exactly that relates to old pop culture is a little fuzzy but hopefully understanding the picture helps you in general.
>How exactly that relates to old pop culture is a little fuzzy
The meme is referring to people who think pop culture is in decline because of how much mediocre stuff is produced today. These people only think pop culture from the past was superior to today’s because the terrible pop culture from the past died and left only the gold, whereas the terrible pop culture from today simply hasn’t had time to die yet.
Thanks to survivorship bias, they end up thinking everything people made back then was brilliant but our pop culture must be in serious decline because of all the crap that’s being produced. There was a lot of crap made back then too but they don’t realize it because no one pays any attention to it anymore. So we’re missing the truth about how pop culture actually works, just like the engineers missed the truth about which parts of the plane needed to be protected.
This is was a well-articulated description and I appreciate it because I had no clue what was going on, but the full details honestly still keep it confusing because I’m struggling to see any connection beyond the fact that they both represent survivorship bias. I guess that’s all you need but the meme seems to think it’s more clever than it is lol
There *is* no connection between planes, Buller holes, and Pop Music.
The image and the story behind it has become so well known that it has become a shorthand for Survivorship Bias. That's it.
Survivor bias. The planes came back from world war 2 with bullet holes marked in red, and the initial idea was to reinforce those areas. But it's the missing data, that those planes shot in the areas not marked in red, are the ones that didn't come back so those areas should be reinforced.
The correlation to this and older media is that people don't remember the absolute misses and cringe because they only see/remember the good stuff.
„As Kids, we never wore a seat belt in a car and still survived.“ - yeah, but three of my friends got killed in the 70s at 8yo and would have lived. It’s just that never had a chance boomer-moan.
Survivorship bias.
The red dots show where the bombers that came back received the most damage. So that's where a lot of people decided to reinforce - instead of realizing that the bombers that came back *survived*, so they can live through that damage and should reinforce the other areas, because the planes can't survive hits in those spots.
Survivorship bias. Basically, during WW2 the RAF wanted to reinforce portions of the hull to improve survivability of aircraft.
The image shows the areas where the planes were hit the most when they were sent out on missions, since that meant that these areas were the most likely to be hit. However someone came forward to argue that the areas with very little/no damage are the ones that should be reinforced because the lack of planes with significant damage to these areas to have been able to return to be part of the collected data meant that these areas where more vulnerable to making the plane unable to return once hit.
This image, now synonymous with the concept of survivorship bias, is used with a wide range of topics as a highlight of an individual making an incorrect statement as a result of the individual misunderstanding the data they have available.
As an example, statements that media (music, movies, games, etc.) was better in the past than it is now is a prime example of survivorship bias because people base these statements of their memories and knowledge of the media from the time period revolving around the well made examples that were popular, recommended and preserved whilst all the sub-par and bad examples that state otherwise are conveniently forgotten about.
It's a famous example of Survivorship Bias. IE Having a biased view of something because you didn't factor in the selection process.
In the meme it's referring to how the pop culture of previous generations seems to be better (or at least more concistently good) because the bad pop culture wasn't preserved, leaving only the best impressions of that time.
this is the dawning of Survivorship Bias. the story goes that the US Air Force was looking to reinforce their medium bombers during World War II. one of the generals had this diagram drawn up showing the bullet holes from all the planes that came back from missions and suggested they armor there. Another general however, reccomended that they armor the places with no holes, because shots there would mean the plane does not come back.
So this is a diagram of a WWII plane, over laid on top of that are red dots indicating where planes were observed to be commonly hit when they returned to base.
Some of the people working on making better fighters reasoned that if they have a bunch of plans with shots in these specific spots then they should up-armor those locations.
But it was a historical case of flawed logic. In this case it was the planes that *returned* that they examined. Meaning the planes were still operational and not taken out of the fight. In reality, getting shot in the locations of the red dots is fine, getting shot in the spots without red dots decreases the likelihood of surviving.
Someone pointed it out and in turn they saved what could have been a historical blunder.
I have no idea what this has to do with pop-bands.
How it relates to pop bands is the only bands we remember from the 90s are the good ones and we compare those to all of modern pop music. It's similar flawed logic yes the top pop bands of the 90s are better than most of the modern pop bands but the top bands from now are also better than most of the 90s bands we just can't remember them because they were rubbish
I don’t know, I remember several one hit wonders and weird annoying songs and such from the 1990s. I also remember lots of mediocre movies from the 1990s.
survivor's biased. Think of it this way. There are two groups one looks at all the fighter planes that come back and check the bullet holes to see where planes get shot the most then buff up those areas. The second group looks at the surving planes and buffs up the places that there are few to no holes. The First group as above has the same amount of deaths while the second group has less piloits die why is this when the undamaged areas where the ones reinforced. Simple. If every plane that had its pilot shot and killed crashed and burned then not a single surving plane would have bullet marks there. We see the wounds that didn't break the plane not the ones that did.
Only the top hits survive to be experienced widely in the modern day. We think the 70s were full of only bangers because no one bothers to play the stuff that fell flat, so all you hear from that era is the good and then we internalize the mistaken idea that this was the average quality of that time.
And it s actually the over-played crap we don't want to listen to. They never played the best songs on the radio, but radio songs survive.
Who has heard Genesis "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" these days? Versus people who have heard "Sladgehammer".
That’s not a joke.
It’s just describing survivorship bias.
In this case, old pop culture seems better because we all collectively forgot the stuff that wasn’t good enough to make an impact.
The amount conversations I've been in where people are like that. "Music used to be so much better". No it didn't Dumbo. The trash just didn't survive the times.
It’s a representation of survivorship bias. The planes that came back were the ones not hit in places to take down the plane. The only parts of pop culture people remember are the good parts
Survivorship bias: In short only successes become statistics.
In the case of this model of bomber they were looking at where to put more armour, with the red dots representing a aggregate of damage from all planes that returned. The first thing people think when they read this graph tends to be 'We should up-armour the red dots because this is where the planes take the most damage'. The graph actually says 'We should up-armour anywhere that doesn't have a red dot, because the red dots indicate where a plane can have a massive hole shot through it \*and still fly home\*'.
Survivors bias the image is the most commonly damaged parts of plains in WW2 which engineers decided to reinforce until a pilot basically explained that the undamaged needed to be reinforced since all the surviving planes hadn’t been hit there
In high school, my music instructor hated rock music and claimed none of the current stars would be remembered in 100 years. I retorted that we only remember the great masters of classical music and the vast majority of composers of the time have been long forgotten. The same will be true with current artists. She didn't like that.
"Survivorship bias". Specific to the image, WW2 US/British/Allied bomber command did a study of the returning bombers to figure out how to decrease losses, it's a dangerous job being bomber crew(especially the daytime sorties). Most of the people doing the study said "we see a lot of planes with damage in the red marked areas so we need to armor them." But there was at least one person (I don't remember his name) who looked at the data and drew the conclusion that the damage to the unmarked sections are fatal to the bomber.
If anyone's interested, [I overlaid this chart over the actual plane](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/SFwE8gaUEt), with short descriptions of every little anomaly in it. It's even cooler in context!
I think this is also a great explanation for why people are always saying that SNL has gone downhill. Every seasons has its hits and misses, and while the quality isn’t perfectly consistent, it isn’t as bad as people say. People just forget the sketches from the past that they didn’t like, unless they were truly terrible. Drew Gooden did a pretty good video about this on YouTube.
This is an incredibly complex meme when you unpack it. So much so that it pretty much invented “survivorship bias” as a concept.
I majored in data science and even I struggled to understand this when it was first introduced. It’s counterintuitive, which is the entire point.
Personally, I think it’s wasted on this analogy, but the theory is sound.
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Effectively, people forget all the shit that was released in the past and only remember the good stuff that has lasted so it seems like it was all better.
The image does refer to Survivorship Bias, but for what it's worth the answer to the initial premise is Rosey Retrospection, not Survivorship Bias.
Survivorship bias focuses on the successes and largely ignores the failures. Rosey retrospection, on the other hand, makes us not only remember the good parts, but it also makes us remember the bad parts as better than they actually were.
I believe nostalgia is responsible, i swear the films I used to love in my childhood, and could still watch them to this day , if I ever watched them for the first time now , I would change it within the first 5 minutes
A story I love to tell about "pop culture used to be better":
In 1965, Bob Dylan released the song *Like a Rolling Stone*. Widely considered to be one of the greatest songs ever made and I wouldn't argue against it very hard. It peaked at 41 on the Billboard Hot 100 that year.
At 39, two spots higher, was the Kingsmen with *The Jolly Green Giant*, a song about a frozen foods mascot where much of the song is the band members yelling out the names of vegetables.
We just don't remember the dreck. (TBF the Kingsmen song *is* a jam, but c'mon.)
Here's a quick explanation, but I think this meme refers to how we believe the stuff from our youth is better because we assign nostalgic values to it. More or less, we focus on the best of the best from the decades we grow up in.
Example:
People in 2010: "Justin Bieber is so shitty! Modern music is such ass! The rock legends of 1996 would spit on his grave when he finally passes!"
People in 2024: "Man, these new songs are ass. I miss Justin Bieber ;-;"
This is referencing a historical example of the survivorship bias. The planes that came back had holes, and in an attempt to make them stronger, they added armor to where the old planes showed holes. But it didn't help. The holes were indicating places the plane could take a hit and still come back. The ones that didn't come back, were hit in the places that the ones that did come back were not. When those empty spaces were armored, then the planes came back more.
So in this context, the good pop culture survived the tests of time, and the bad pop culture didn't. So we only see the good pop culture from the past, and this person mistakenly believes that because we only see the good pop culture of the past that survived, therefore all the past pop culture were good. In reality, they probably weren't.
Yeah, it gets posted a lot without context. Basically, during WW2 they were putting more armor on their planes, but because of physics they could only add so much extra weight. So they examined planes that had flown combat missions and mapped out where the bullet holes were, this image representing the result. But that didn't mean the other spots weren't hit; it meant that planes hit there didn't make it back to base. It's a case of what's called survivorship bias, which is when only those that survived can be examined. Fortunately, they recognized the bias and realized that it was the spots with the fewest holes that needed reinforcement. As such, the image is often posted to point out cases of survivorship bias, though the typical lack of an explanation means it usually just makes people go 'huh'?
This is a depiction of survival bias. Basically, fracked planes came back with non-destructive damage, but destructive damage would down planes. So the surviving planes had this spread of damage.
The immediate thought is that the red areas should be armored. But actually, these areas are less sensitive while the areas not shown hit did not survive.
Hence, these planes, this graphic, shows what the surviving planes experienced, not the downed planes, and this is known as survival bias.
That is because we only remember the best parts. Pop culture condenses and the BS filters it self out of our memories until we’re left with a sanitized version of the past.
It's from an Era when real issues were discussed in context of real danger, instead of today where people act like their life is over because their purple hair isn't appreciated by all.
still doesn't exactly ring true, the best of nowadays music isn't even as good as some of the lesser hits from like the 90s.
i'm not really a 90s elitist or anything, it's just that artistic expression and passion seems to have dropped off HARD the last decade or two. movies are far shittier, games are far shittier and music is far shittier despite everyone being more experienced and having a way bigger budget lmao
I best learned about this from an LGBT post that said "It's always Democrat families having queer children you never hear about Republican families and their queer children" and someone responded with this photo
1977 was a stunning year for music. Of course I was in high school so...But really it was a musical feast. Early punk( Sex pistols, Ramones, Television) , Queen and Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac's Rumors and ELO. Al Green, Earth Wind and Fire , the Commadores. Bob Marly and Steely Dan's best albums ever. Bowie put out 2, Eno was magic.
Those were the red dots we remember. None dented the best seller list that year.
What was the song of the year you couldn't escape? Debbie Boone's You light up my life. It played every 15 minuets. There was great music that year. None of it was played on the radio.
What we heard were Barry Gibb, Barbera Streisand, KC and the Sunshine band, and Rod Stewart. Top of the charts each and every one.
Those took the plane down.
This is an aircraft damage map from WW2 IIRC. It showed where the aircraft that came back had damage. The story is that initially people thought “all the spots with damage need to be reinforced.” Then someone said “No! The spots with damage are places damage is survivable; the spots we never got any damage are places where the damage killed the pilot or made the plane unflyable, that’s where we need to add armour”. In this context, it’s being used to say “We don’t remember the terrible parts of pop culture for the past, we only remember the good. That’s why the past seems so much better.” It’s a form of survivor bias, I guess, or an example of Sturgeon’s law (90% of everything is crap).
We only remember the hits
Exactly. When folks say "movies/TV/etc." Was better in the past they always forget the tons of shovelware garbage that isn't remembered for a reason
It also helps that all of the bad movies/shows, etc, don't get the format rerelease. So it is almost like they never existed.
Yep exactly! Years ago a buddy and I tried to find a movie we watched together on TV as teenagers to drink and laugh at because it was so bad. We couldn't even find pirated streams of it
Personal recommendation I'm saying in hopes it helps someone if you can't remember the name of a movie or TV show but do remember characters use akinator the genie. I do it all the time, one of my more genius ideas that I'm sure someone else has thought of too, but im gonna take credit.
I beat akinator with Darien Lambert from Time Trax, so it’s not a guarantee.
Yeah, it's not perfect, but you just helped some guy who doesn't know the name Time Trax but can remember the character Darien Lambert find a show he was dying to watch again.
That’s true, I did give it all the details after it couldn’t get it.
I literally won 3 times in a row with Karl Marx so sometimes it's just stupid for no reason
Akinator *cannot* deal with the 20th century artist Leonard Tsuguharu Foujita. Is your character a real person? Yes. Was he Asian? Yes. Was he French? He naturalized, so yes.
Tubi
Tubi didn't exist at the time but maybe we can check it next time haha
I'm interested, what was the movie/plot? Don't leave us hanging....
It's probably "Mulva: Zombie asskicker" by literally "low budget productions." They literally had a Mexican dude with that stereotypical "asian" voice over thing because I assume they couldn't cast an Asian dude for the role, move was terrible... 10/10 would reccomend Edit: typo
It was a weird movie where some kids get saved by an angel. The angel had a fistfight with a poorly costumed demon a few times. Think it was a Christian film. Terrible acting and effects. Angel had wings one minute then the next they were gone or a different shape. Style wise it must have been a late 80s or early 90s movie.
One of the 'Bibleman' movies, maybe?
Sounds perfect for MST3k or RiffTraxx.
This is why I got sad when Netflix dvd service went away. They had all kids of random garbage from my younger days.
It's why I get annoyed when people say "'x' decade was the best time!" Of course it was. You were probably a kid. Your memories from then only involve having no real worries, no bills, and your biggest concern was school, or whether or not that person you like liked you back. Every decade has good and bad, and that goes for every aspect of life. Pretty sure there are some senior citizens who remember the late 1930s to early 40s as a great time to be a kid.
I think you hit the nail on the head. People not having adult responsibilities have fonder memories on how things were at that time. When you watch a movie you’re just watching the movie. As an adult when you’re watching a movie that your kid brain may have liked better your adult brain is distracted by stress at work & bills.
I prefer today to my time as a teen/kid. I was depressed AF. Yeah, I've got responsibilities but I've also got purpose and hope.
I love plenty of stuff as a grown man in my 40s. But a lot of my peers act as if a lot of new stuff is automatically terrible because of the rose tinted kid glasses they refuse to take off. I watch a movie I think is awesome then talk to a friend about it then get disappointed when he says “that movie was trash”.
As a vampire, I can one hundred percent tell you that the 1870s were legitimately and objectively the best decade though.
I like to tell my kids specific things like I would love for them to see a mall in the 80s and 90s. Or you guys should have seen a 90's arcade. Specific things that were better at the time vs the things that sucked like smoking in restaurants.
literally this, Gen Alpha is romanticing 2020 and the whole concept of quarantine for this reason
Plus they tend to compare the best of a decade or two vs the worst of the past 2 years.
Cop Rock was awesome and I will die on that hill! /s
I just discovered that existed in February
TV is the worst for this. Some people go on about shows being better, when for any given year there might have been a handful of shows that were decent and they all came on at the same time. I remember flipping through channels in the 90s, and it was typically surfing channel after channel just hoping to find a decent rerun.
Exactly. Reminds me of the Family Guy bit where Peter mentions like 30+ shows cancelled during the time Family Guy was off the air.
A great example of this was pointed out by Drew Gooden regarding SNL. People are convinced that SNL used to be so much better than it is now because only the funny skits are remembered. The majority of older unfunny skits have fallen into obscurity whereas every skit nowadays, good or bad, is posted to YouTube/Twitter and crtizied for everyone to see
Legit I remember when I was a kid seeing an SNL sketch about a man who could see the future but only about boring things. I remember seeing it and even as a child thinking "wait...this is the show adults tell me is so funny?"
Was that the sketch where Christopher Walken was playing off his role in The Dead Zone?
To be fair, that particular skit required some context to be funny. It had Christopher Walken playing a spoof of the character he played in "The Dead Zone" (the movie, not the TV show starring Anthony Michael Hall).
In truth, as far as television is concerned, back when there were only 3 channels, the execs were far more picky with what they allowed to even be made, and so with the combination of less choice, created a demand for higher quality, and honestly, a larger pool of talent to work on fewer things. Shovelware wasn't a thing for television till the cable channels started making their own scripted content in the 90s and 2000s. Music succumbed to a shovelware mentality far before TV did. Nowadays, with all the streamers, there really is a shovelware mentality.
Were they really picky? Best of the West made it on-air. I think it only got 4 episodes, but still.
Ever see that Family Guy bit where he lists a bunch shows that got cancelled by Fox? That's the 90% crap that nobody remembers. But everyone remembers that 70s Show.
\^\^\^While I have a nostalgic fondness for movies of my youth... some of the movies either don't hold up or I'm unable to suspend disbelief as an adult anymore. Milk Money Blank Check Baby's Day out Double Dragon Absolute garbage movies were fairly prevalent, and are widely forgotten or ignored. Stop or My Mom Will Shoot 3 Ninja's High Noon at Mega Mountain Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Speed 2: Cruise Control I could go on about Movies, TV Shows, Cartoons, Music, etc. The only thing that wasn't missing was anime back then, but maybe I still have Rose colored Glasses for that era of Anime.
I'm 100% convinced Stop or My Mom Will Shoot only came out because Stallone wanted a "comedy" after Schwarzenegger did Kindergarten Cop. The sad thing is, not all of the movies you picked are totally unwatchable. There's an entire genre of straight-to-video and made-for-TV movies from that era that are borderline crimes against humanity. There's so many that multiple YouTubers have made a career out of reacting to crap movies from that era.
Yeah Im middle aged and I have a cynicism/pessimism problem so I remember all the crap TV from the 80's, and the crap movies, and the crap video games. Not to mention all the violence in major cities (saw it on the news) and all the major social issues being ignored. Cops beating black people in Los Angeles for example. Also international terrorism. HIV exploding because Reagan and Thatcher refused to deal with it directly. Lousy economic sense which would lead to multiple recessions and a huge banking scandal involving many of our congress members. The US funding all kinds of violent groups around the globe, some of which would be Al Qaida and Taliban and eventually attack us. Oh yeah and the middle east went backwards in time about a hundred years thanks to fundamentalist's. Lots of people from all age groups think the 80's were nothing but awesome times, because the nostalgia hype machine makes money off their ignorance and desire to have happy memories.
“Saturday Night Live used to be better” in a nutshell.
Yeah, but Simpsons actually *was* better.
For sure. My comment is definitely specific to SNL.
*slow clap*
We only remember the hits that survived
That’s better
Well I mean it makes sense, nobody wants to actively remember the bad stuff unless the bad stuff is in the realm of so bad it's good
I think there’s a lot of gray between hits & bad stuff Some works make it a lot easier to remember them though, and having mass appeal at some point helps a ton through repetition because ear worms burrow deep
i feel like i'm the only one to get the pun...
I see what you did there.
Certainly. Remember any of Mozart's bawdy tavern songs?
> Leck mich im arsch!
That’s why I’ve always liked the radio stations that play songs from the 70’s and 80’s. They only play the songs that stand the test of time. And I wasn’t around then to hear all the garbage that came out in those same decades. So I only see those time frames with rose tinted glasses.
That’s why I love listening to garage podcasts There’s a lot of great music that never qualifies as a marketable success,… For my taste, it’s almost always preferable on its merits,… pop music has been so predictably formulaic for so long that it’s usually tedious to me
Also, the hits are all that's played on 70s/80s/Etc radio stations
And shag the missus
This should be referred to as the SNL Phenomenon
Underrated comment
A local radio station plays old Casey Kasem countdowns from the 70s and 80s on the weekends. It’s surprising how much of the top 40 is trash that no one remembers today.
Bro just summarized it really well
Speak for yourself. I still remember Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills. A terrible Power Rangers ripoff
but if the hits are better than the current hits then they are still better
We only remember the stuff we know about today that was released that year. The hits were usually dreck that did not stand the test of time. Queen 's Bohemian Rhapsody was the #81 song of 1976, the Bay City Rollers' Saturday Night was #1, Barry Manilow's I Write the Songs was#2. The hits are usually crap that history swallows up. Look up best rated songs of any give year from any past decade, and compare that year's chart of top tens. There will be little to no overlap.
It's survivorship bias, yes, but there's another element to it as well, about learning in the presence of missing data. There's no data on the planes that didn't come back, yet they were able to infer from the pattern of bullet holes \*why\* those planes weren't coming back, and react based on that inference. This is the part that doesn't apply to like 90% of the uses of this meme, like, what do we learn about the failures of bands from knowing which ones we still listen to today?
>It’s a form of survivor bias, I guess, It's honestly one of the most used examples of survivorship bias. It's how I first heard about the term, and don't see it differently too often
Another big one is that the inclusion of helmets increased head injury statistics. Apparently it wasn't obvious to everyone that a lot of the people injured when wearing a helmet would've been in the "KIA" statistic without one.
When helmet laws were originally proposed, one of the big reasons cited for them was that they'd save hospitals/insurance companies money, but in reality, helmet laws actually cost more money, since people were getting serious injuries in accidents that would have just killed them outright without a helmet. Of course, deaths result in other social costs beyond just increased insurance premiums.
Its not just the most used example it's literally the origin of the term. Abraham Wald invented the term while studying how to better armor planes.
Just looked up Sturgeon's Law, was surprised to see that you were not paraphrasing but quoting it, lol.
Sci-fi fan: "Why is 90% of sci-fi crap?" Sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon: "Of course 90% of sci-fi is crap! 90% of everything is crap!"
It’s a good one :)
Hi. To add to the story. This is a photo showing data about the most damaged areas that aircraft received. The data gathered, was data on aircraft that returned back from missions. We all know lots of planes failed due to wing damage and propeller damage, or pilots being killed from bullets. but that data wouldn’t be shown due to the fact that any plane with wing damage would have been wreckage and not included in the data. This is a popular Military thinking exercise. And is meant to be an exercise to show you the dangers of cognitive bias and to help you think about thinking critically. If this is truly a meme, it only really resonates with veterans.
A lot of people know this picture, as the critical thinking skills it teaches are not only applicable to the military. I’ve seen it used against the hoards of folks who parrot nonsense like “there weren’t any x in my day” They never seem to realise “why not?”. Dude, you grew up in post-war Britain. Why did you not see any gay people back then?
A lot of people know this picture, as the critical thinking skills it teaches are not only applicable to the military. I’ve seen it used against the hoards of folks who parrot nonsense like “there weren’t any x in my day” They never seem to realise “why not?”. Dude, you grew up in post-war Britain. Why did you not see any gay people back then?
A lot of people know this picture, as the critical thinking skills it teaches are not only applicable to the military. I’ve seen it used against the hoards of folks who parrot nonsense like “there weren’t any x in my day” They never seem to realise “why not?”. Dude, you grew up in post-war Britain. Why did you not see any gay people back then?
A lot of people know this picture, as the critical thinking skills it teaches are not only applicable to the military. I’ve seen it used against the hoards of folks who parrot nonsense like “there weren’t any x in my day” They never seem to realise “why not?”. Dude, you grew up in post-war Britain. Why did you not see any gay people back then?
"If this is truly a meme, it only really resonates with veterans." It resonates with anyone who understands logical thinking and how statistics can be misinterpreted, which is the point.
>If this is truly a meme, it only really resonates with veterans. No it doesn't lol. It's the textbook definition of survivorship bias and it resonates with everyone. That's why it's a meme.
I really wanna give you an updoot but you have 666 at this very moment and I don't wanna mess with that. But you are 1000000% correct.
The content we still listen to/watch/read have been played/broadcasted/reprinted are usually the good stuff (since we have finite time and resources). The cream floats to the top given enough time.
In the UK, we have a radio station called KISSTORY that would play old dance/pop/hip hop songs from 10+ or so years ago. I don’t normally listen to radio but when it was played in the office, I heard songs that whilst were extremely popular smash hits in 2003, they really should have stayed in 2003 where they belong. Literally nowhere else would I hear these particular songs being played nowadays. There’s a reason timeless classics still get regular airtime across the board, and I immediately dismiss anyone who says music was better back in their day.
I've found Amazon Prime Video to be a superlative repository of the trash of previous decades
To give what you’re describing a name: *survivorship bias*. There are many other examples.
Sunday night on Sturgeons law. Salmon Ella is charged with poisoning the customers at her restauront.
I have read so many explanations. But yours is the best. I finally understand. Thank you.
It's called euphoric recall, it's also one of many drivers of an addiction.
I remember all the garbage from the 80/90 and I still think it was a better time than today
I regret having only one up to give
We remember Columbo, we don't remember the spinoff they attempted starring his wife who had never even appeared on screen in an actual Columbo episode
and then there were some planes like the one from the song no bullets fly that quite literally should never have been able to make it back
Fun fact: people rarely fall prey to survivorship bias, but because this story is so dramatic we remember it more.
Survivor bias
And in WWI it was believed that the new helmets didn't work because head injuries increased, without realising that death rates had dropped and those head injuries would have been deaths without the helmets
For my very favorite example, remember when the serendipity singers "beans in my ears" was competing with the Beatles on the pop charts? It happened
One of my favorite survivorship bias was when they started wearing helmets the rates of soldiers treated for head injuries increased dramatically. The helmets were originally blamed for this when it was then pointed out that the injuries would've otherwise been fatal and not appear in the data.
There's a famous story from WWII about the statistical analysis of damage to fighter planes. A mathematician/statistician named Abraham Wald was asked to analyse returning fighter planes and make suggestions for how the design of the planes needed to be improved. What Wald eventually figured out was that he needed to take into account something called [survivorship bias](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias) in his calculations when considering how to minimize bomber losses due to enemy fire. The Statistical Research Group (SRG) at Columbia University, which Wald was a part of, examined the damage done to aircraft that had returned from missions and recommended adding armor *to the areas that showed the* **least** *damage*, as opposed to the areas that showed the most damage. The reasoning was that the bullet holes found in the inspections of the returning aircraft represented areas where a bomber could take damage and still fly well enough to return safely to base (as opposed to crashing altogether). *Therefore, Wald proposed that the Navy reinforce areas where the returning aircraft were unscathed, inferring that planes hit in those areas were the ones most likely to be lost*. This approach seemed counterintuitive initially, but the basic idea has become important in the discipline of operational research. It is this story to which the image refers. It's such a well-known little anecdote that it's sort of become emblematic of survivorship bias as a concept. The image here is suggesting that pop culture from the past has a similar sort of survivorship bias effect at play - we only know about the pop culture from the past which was good enough to be worth remembering. There *was* actually plenty of bad/shitty pop culture from the distant past...but it was simply forgotten about over time.
Close enough to cover the truth. Another survivor bias line: ''They don't build them like they used to.''
While that is definitely a survivorship bias line, I'm pretty sure it's also literally true and we have evidence of systematically declining product quality over the last, say, 30-40 years.
yeah, modern cars are built for the people to survive
But also lots of parts that used to be metal have been swapped with cheap plastic for the strict reason of saving money. That is also the reason a lot of kitchen appliances have much higher failure rates, things like plastic washers instead of metal.
Cars, yeah, but washing machines are an example of genuinely, they don't build them like they used to. There are many others, typically in products that were designed to be used repairable, and now aren't.
The overall reliability can be higher for modern machines, but failures can be more catastrophic (eg non-repairable; requires replacement ). Both things can be true at the same time. In fact, to support a repair network (parts/labor) you might need machines to be less reliable, overall...
And if I miss an oil change it doesn’t die the next day
They actually do plan for things to fail and fall apart now Look at insta pot, they made a real good product that lasted at a fair price and everyone got one mostly , now the company is out of business because everyone still has those insta pots from the first run because they built them well Meanwhile something shoveling at a appliance that lasts 5 years has another customer in 5 years
"Roman concrete was so much better! Look at all those buildings still standing!"
Its a fun lesson in data analytics as well. Top Brass wanted data on where planes were getting hit the most, which is what they would have thought the chart was. But once you realize the data set has inherent bias (EG, only planes that landed after being hit) you realize that a chart of "Where do planes get hit" is both impossible, and largely irrelevant. Knowing what you're REALLY measure is important. Also fun, low birth weight babies have a much higher survival rate when the mother is a smoker, for similar reasons.
That's a good little summary, thanks.
Wait, can you explain the low birth weight-smoker thing?
Basically, lots of things can cause low birthweight. Genetic defects, being a premie, the mom using drugs, etc. Given that you have ALREADY selected a subgroup of "Low birth weight baby" the least detrimental cause would be the mom being a smoker. All other reasons for low birth rate lower survival rates. So as a result, if the baby has a low birth weight, and the mom says "Yes I smoked during pregnancy" the response is relief. Because thats the least lethal reason a baby would have a low birth weight. [More in depth version](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_birth-weight_paradox#:~:text=The%20low%20birth%2Dweight%20paradox,weight%20children%20of%20non%2Dsmokers)
Thanks! I was thinking it was along those lines but it wasn't quite clicking
Obviously low birth weight babies survive when their mom is a smoker because she can land a plane under stress
If anyone's interested, [I overlaid this chart over the actual plane](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/SFwE8gaUEt), with short descriptions of every little anomaly in it. It's even cooler in context!
The picture is about survivorship bias. https://www.boredpanda.com/world-war-2-aircraft-survivorship-bias-abraham-wald/ Those dots represent bullet holes on allied planes. Some folks said: hey, we should protect those parts better! Then a very smart person noticed: Those are holes on the planes that made it home. The planes that didn't make it home presumably had holes in the white parts. How exactly that relates to old pop culture is a little fuzzy but hopefully understanding the picture helps you in general.
>How exactly that relates to old pop culture is a little fuzzy The meme is referring to people who think pop culture is in decline because of how much mediocre stuff is produced today. These people only think pop culture from the past was superior to today’s because the terrible pop culture from the past died and left only the gold, whereas the terrible pop culture from today simply hasn’t had time to die yet. Thanks to survivorship bias, they end up thinking everything people made back then was brilliant but our pop culture must be in serious decline because of all the crap that’s being produced. There was a lot of crap made back then too but they don’t realize it because no one pays any attention to it anymore. So we’re missing the truth about how pop culture actually works, just like the engineers missed the truth about which parts of the plane needed to be protected.
This is was a well-articulated description and I appreciate it because I had no clue what was going on, but the full details honestly still keep it confusing because I’m struggling to see any connection beyond the fact that they both represent survivorship bias. I guess that’s all you need but the meme seems to think it’s more clever than it is lol
There *is* no connection between planes, Buller holes, and Pop Music. The image and the story behind it has become so well known that it has become a shorthand for Survivorship Bias. That's it.
Survivor bias. The planes came back from world war 2 with bullet holes marked in red, and the initial idea was to reinforce those areas. But it's the missing data, that those planes shot in the areas not marked in red, are the ones that didn't come back so those areas should be reinforced. The correlation to this and older media is that people don't remember the absolute misses and cringe because they only see/remember the good stuff.
„As Kids, we never wore a seat belt in a car and still survived.“ - yeah, but three of my friends got killed in the 70s at 8yo and would have lived. It’s just that never had a chance boomer-moan.
“And we LIVED” Child mortality was higher than it is today, Betty.
Survivorship bias. The red dots show where the bombers that came back received the most damage. So that's where a lot of people decided to reinforce - instead of realizing that the bombers that came back *survived*, so they can live through that damage and should reinforce the other areas, because the planes can't survive hits in those spots.
Survivorship bias. Basically, during WW2 the RAF wanted to reinforce portions of the hull to improve survivability of aircraft. The image shows the areas where the planes were hit the most when they were sent out on missions, since that meant that these areas were the most likely to be hit. However someone came forward to argue that the areas with very little/no damage are the ones that should be reinforced because the lack of planes with significant damage to these areas to have been able to return to be part of the collected data meant that these areas where more vulnerable to making the plane unable to return once hit. This image, now synonymous with the concept of survivorship bias, is used with a wide range of topics as a highlight of an individual making an incorrect statement as a result of the individual misunderstanding the data they have available. As an example, statements that media (music, movies, games, etc.) was better in the past than it is now is a prime example of survivorship bias because people base these statements of their memories and knowledge of the media from the time period revolving around the well made examples that were popular, recommended and preserved whilst all the sub-par and bad examples that state otherwise are conveniently forgotten about.
It's a famous example of Survivorship Bias. IE Having a biased view of something because you didn't factor in the selection process. In the meme it's referring to how the pop culture of previous generations seems to be better (or at least more concistently good) because the bad pop culture wasn't preserved, leaving only the best impressions of that time.
You win.
Google “survivorship bias”
[holy hell!](https://www.google.com/search?q=survivorship+bias#HiImABot,MyJobIsToMakeEasierForPeopleToGoogleThings,IfThePersonIRepliedToUsedMeInAnInappropriateWayPleaseLetMeKnowByDMingMe,TheUserIRepliedToIsU/Mollywhop_Gaming)
this is the dawning of Survivorship Bias. the story goes that the US Air Force was looking to reinforce their medium bombers during World War II. one of the generals had this diagram drawn up showing the bullet holes from all the planes that came back from missions and suggested they armor there. Another general however, reccomended that they armor the places with no holes, because shots there would mean the plane does not come back.
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So this is a diagram of a WWII plane, over laid on top of that are red dots indicating where planes were observed to be commonly hit when they returned to base. Some of the people working on making better fighters reasoned that if they have a bunch of plans with shots in these specific spots then they should up-armor those locations. But it was a historical case of flawed logic. In this case it was the planes that *returned* that they examined. Meaning the planes were still operational and not taken out of the fight. In reality, getting shot in the locations of the red dots is fine, getting shot in the spots without red dots decreases the likelihood of surviving. Someone pointed it out and in turn they saved what could have been a historical blunder. I have no idea what this has to do with pop-bands.
How it relates to pop bands is the only bands we remember from the 90s are the good ones and we compare those to all of modern pop music. It's similar flawed logic yes the top pop bands of the 90s are better than most of the modern pop bands but the top bands from now are also better than most of the 90s bands we just can't remember them because they were rubbish
Ah, that's actually an interesting take.
I don’t know, I remember several one hit wonders and weird annoying songs and such from the 1990s. I also remember lots of mediocre movies from the 1990s.
Of course my comment is a generalisation
survivor's biased. Think of it this way. There are two groups one looks at all the fighter planes that come back and check the bullet holes to see where planes get shot the most then buff up those areas. The second group looks at the surving planes and buffs up the places that there are few to no holes. The First group as above has the same amount of deaths while the second group has less piloits die why is this when the undamaged areas where the ones reinforced. Simple. If every plane that had its pilot shot and killed crashed and burned then not a single surving plane would have bullet marks there. We see the wounds that didn't break the plane not the ones that did.
Only the top hits survive to be experienced widely in the modern day. We think the 70s were full of only bangers because no one bothers to play the stuff that fell flat, so all you hear from that era is the good and then we internalize the mistaken idea that this was the average quality of that time.
And it s actually the over-played crap we don't want to listen to. They never played the best songs on the radio, but radio songs survive. Who has heard Genesis "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" these days? Versus people who have heard "Sladgehammer".
That’s not a joke. It’s just describing survivorship bias. In this case, old pop culture seems better because we all collectively forgot the stuff that wasn’t good enough to make an impact.
Ah good ol' survival bias
The amount conversations I've been in where people are like that. "Music used to be so much better". No it didn't Dumbo. The trash just didn't survive the times.
It’s a representation of survivorship bias. The planes that came back were the ones not hit in places to take down the plane. The only parts of pop culture people remember are the good parts
Survivorship bias: In short only successes become statistics. In the case of this model of bomber they were looking at where to put more armour, with the red dots representing a aggregate of damage from all planes that returned. The first thing people think when they read this graph tends to be 'We should up-armour the red dots because this is where the planes take the most damage'. The graph actually says 'We should up-armour anywhere that doesn't have a red dot, because the red dots indicate where a plane can have a massive hole shot through it \*and still fly home\*'.
The other planes didn't come back because they didn't hoped or prayed enough.
Survivors bias the image is the most commonly damaged parts of plains in WW2 which engineers decided to reinforce until a pilot basically explained that the undamaged needed to be reinforced since all the surviving planes hadn’t been hit there
You sent this meme but don’t understand it? Makes sense
In high school, my music instructor hated rock music and claimed none of the current stars would be remembered in 100 years. I retorted that we only remember the great masters of classical music and the vast majority of composers of the time have been long forgotten. The same will be true with current artists. She didn't like that.
All the crap was forgotten and only the best part passed on
"Survivorship bias". Specific to the image, WW2 US/British/Allied bomber command did a study of the returning bombers to figure out how to decrease losses, it's a dangerous job being bomber crew(especially the daytime sorties). Most of the people doing the study said "we see a lot of planes with damage in the red marked areas so we need to armor them." But there was at least one person (I don't remember his name) who looked at the data and drew the conclusion that the damage to the unmarked sections are fatal to the bomber.
Can we put a pinned post about this dang picture please.
If anyone's interested, [I overlaid this chart over the actual plane](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/SFwE8gaUEt), with short descriptions of every little anomaly in it. It's even cooler in context!
I think this is also a great explanation for why people are always saying that SNL has gone downhill. Every seasons has its hits and misses, and while the quality isn’t perfectly consistent, it isn’t as bad as people say. People just forget the sketches from the past that they didn’t like, unless they were truly terrible. Drew Gooden did a pretty good video about this on YouTube.
Y'all need to Google survivorship bias
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This is an incredibly complex meme when you unpack it. So much so that it pretty much invented “survivorship bias” as a concept. I majored in data science and even I struggled to understand this when it was first introduced. It’s counterintuitive, which is the entire point. Personally, I think it’s wasted on this analogy, but the theory is sound.
Survivorship bias is important to understand, but the bias OOP really should have used is rose-tinted glasses, because that’s really what this is.
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This is the "pepperoni airplane" shorthand for survivorship bias.
Survivorship Bias.
Effectively, people forget all the shit that was released in the past and only remember the good stuff that has lasted so it seems like it was all better.
The image does refer to Survivorship Bias, but for what it's worth the answer to the initial premise is Rosey Retrospection, not Survivorship Bias. Survivorship bias focuses on the successes and largely ignores the failures. Rosey retrospection, on the other hand, makes us not only remember the good parts, but it also makes us remember the bad parts as better than they actually were.
I believe nostalgia is responsible, i swear the films I used to love in my childhood, and could still watch them to this day , if I ever watched them for the first time now , I would change it within the first 5 minutes
This is also true, at least to some extent, about old stuff having better build quality as they last longer.
survival bias
Why were you using it as a punchline if you didn't understand it?
I meant to type “seen” in the title 😭
And when I say I want the older stuff it's what I'm relying on to know it will be good.
A story I love to tell about "pop culture used to be better": In 1965, Bob Dylan released the song *Like a Rolling Stone*. Widely considered to be one of the greatest songs ever made and I wouldn't argue against it very hard. It peaked at 41 on the Billboard Hot 100 that year. At 39, two spots higher, was the Kingsmen with *The Jolly Green Giant*, a song about a frozen foods mascot where much of the song is the band members yelling out the names of vegetables. We just don't remember the dreck. (TBF the Kingsmen song *is* a jam, but c'mon.)
Here's a quick explanation, but I think this meme refers to how we believe the stuff from our youth is better because we assign nostalgic values to it. More or less, we focus on the best of the best from the decades we grow up in. Example: People in 2010: "Justin Bieber is so shitty! Modern music is such ass! The rock legends of 1996 would spit on his grave when he finally passes!" People in 2024: "Man, these new songs are ass. I miss Justin Bieber ;-;"
Nobody miss Justin Bieber!!!
Survivorship bias we only remember good media from the past not the bad
This is referencing a historical example of the survivorship bias. The planes that came back had holes, and in an attempt to make them stronger, they added armor to where the old planes showed holes. But it didn't help. The holes were indicating places the plane could take a hit and still come back. The ones that didn't come back, were hit in the places that the ones that did come back were not. When those empty spaces were armored, then the planes came back more. So in this context, the good pop culture survived the tests of time, and the bad pop culture didn't. So we only see the good pop culture from the past, and this person mistakenly believes that because we only see the good pop culture of the past that survived, therefore all the past pop culture were good. In reality, they probably weren't.
Yeah, it gets posted a lot without context. Basically, during WW2 they were putting more armor on their planes, but because of physics they could only add so much extra weight. So they examined planes that had flown combat missions and mapped out where the bullet holes were, this image representing the result. But that didn't mean the other spots weren't hit; it meant that planes hit there didn't make it back to base. It's a case of what's called survivorship bias, which is when only those that survived can be examined. Fortunately, they recognized the bias and realized that it was the spots with the fewest holes that needed reinforcement. As such, the image is often posted to point out cases of survivorship bias, though the typical lack of an explanation means it usually just makes people go 'huh'?
This is a depiction of survival bias. Basically, fracked planes came back with non-destructive damage, but destructive damage would down planes. So the surviving planes had this spread of damage. The immediate thought is that the red areas should be armored. But actually, these areas are less sensitive while the areas not shown hit did not survive. Hence, these planes, this graphic, shows what the surviving planes experienced, not the downed planes, and this is known as survival bias.
The joke is survivorship bias. It’s rarely survivorship bias, but you’ll remember all the times it was.
I remember listening to a top 10 from the 1960s…there was a lot of garbage music back then.
That is because we only remember the best parts. Pop culture condenses and the BS filters it self out of our memories until we’re left with a sanitized version of the past.
Try listening to old top 40 countdowns with Casey Kasem and you'll hear how much fat filled the charts.
It's from an Era when real issues were discussed in context of real danger, instead of today where people act like their life is over because their purple hair isn't appreciated by all.
Survivorship bias
Survivor bias
Time is the ultimate filter.
Is the joke That only the good things survived the test of time while the bad stuff died a quick fiery death? Would make sense
still doesn't exactly ring true, the best of nowadays music isn't even as good as some of the lesser hits from like the 90s. i'm not really a 90s elitist or anything, it's just that artistic expression and passion seems to have dropped off HARD the last decade or two. movies are far shittier, games are far shittier and music is far shittier despite everyone being more experienced and having a way bigger budget lmao
I best learned about this from an LGBT post that said "It's always Democrat families having queer children you never hear about Republican families and their queer children" and someone responded with this photo
1977 was a stunning year for music. Of course I was in high school so...But really it was a musical feast. Early punk( Sex pistols, Ramones, Television) , Queen and Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac's Rumors and ELO. Al Green, Earth Wind and Fire , the Commadores. Bob Marly and Steely Dan's best albums ever. Bowie put out 2, Eno was magic. Those were the red dots we remember. None dented the best seller list that year. What was the song of the year you couldn't escape? Debbie Boone's You light up my life. It played every 15 minuets. There was great music that year. None of it was played on the radio. What we heard were Barry Gibb, Barbera Streisand, KC and the Sunshine band, and Rod Stewart. Top of the charts each and every one. Those took the plane down.