Michael Graham Richard has a great post about survivor bias of frontier log cabins - essentially all the ones you see are well made because they were well made:
I have to chuckle whenever I read yet another description of American frontier log cabins as having been well crafted or sturdily or beautifully built. The much more likely truth is that 99% of frontier log cabins were horribly built—it’s just that all of those fell down. The few that have survived intact were the ones that were well made. That doesn’t mean all of them were.
He also makes the point that the classical music you hear today is good precisely because it is still around – history buries the mediocre.
Hey! Thanks for the link.
I had no idea that a whole blog was dedicated to Survivor Bias. Sounds interesting, I’ll read the archives.