the big lesson of survivor bias is that you should optimize for being a survivor
this sounds like a smartass tweet but I'm totally serious you can't win if you lose so learn to not lose most major failure conditions are avoidable with a little bit of foresight, planning, study, etc etc. just analyze failures and don't do/be that
most businesses fail because IME most (more than half of) businesses are started by people who don't do any due diligence, ie using your life savings to start a restaurant without ever having worked in one, or even read about the specifics of the struggles involved
most marriages similarly end in divorce because https://x.com/visakanv/status/...
failures are inevitable, but the trick is that you can fail early or fail late. isolate your failures as early as possible. do 100 pitches. you likely won't even get that far https://x.com/visakanv/status/...
try to fail (intelligently) as much as possible, as cheaply as possible, as early as possible. you learn what's right by eliminating everything that's wrong. generally can do that a lot faster and a lot cheaper than people seem to assume https://x.com/visakanv/status/...
then when you win, after decades of putting in the work, and more importantly, avoiding the big open pits in the ground that everyone around you keeps falling into, they'll say– well, it's survivor bias. 😅
thread
you can increase your exposure to luck
big part of all of this is solving for distribution http://visakanv.com/blog/solve...
thread on risk
buffett talking about once-in-a-century cautionary news stories he’d put up on the walls to remind himself to optimize for survival
“everything happens if you stay alive” - al pacino