The archipelagos of the Mediterranean must encounter the archipelagos of Asia and the archipelagos of the Antilles. I think the idea of the archipelago - as a place where we can begin to understand and resolve the contradictions of the world - should be propagated. I was introduced to the idea of archipelagos as conceived by the philosopher Édouard Glissant. Around San Francisco this tends to centre around progress studies (and innovation) and effective altruism, also existential risk, but the concept is wider than that. Long Now are interested in long-termism across all areas (link here). While there, the military would consult with the group for various questions, and Wald wound up with the question about developing a way to estimate plane vulnerability based on the damage observed on returning planes. During the war, Wald was part of the Statistical Research Group of Columbia University. While the story has been exaggerated by the internet, this is work that a researcher Wald did do in 1943. The diagram doesn't show where planes get shot-it shows where planes get shot and still survive. That’s because those planes never made it back home… In this case, not only is the sample not representative, it's *inversely* correlated with what we want to put armour (which a sense of the physics of a plane would also get you). The naive answer is: where the holes were found.Īt this point, an astute observer, or one who cross-checks data with intuition, might notice that this does not include the engines or cockpit, which seem like pretty sensitive parts of the plane-more so than, say, the wingtips. What parts of the plane do you prioritize for armor? But you can't armor the whole plane (for weight among other reasons). The picture which represents a WW2 plane is a better story. All the bad ones went bankrupt, left investing and so you are only looking at the survivors. This is a problem in looking at the current sample of investors and fund managers. This is where the data or observation you see are not representative because some elements have been eliminated before you see the sample. It’s a reference to a bias, we often have: “survivorship bias”.