Survivor Bias is a blog about the role that randomness and statistics plays in the news, finance and everyday life. Randomness is often downplayed as a factor – people want simple causality because it implies that they can simply control every aspect of life. It’s very easy to be fooled when you look at events in isolation.
This blog will mostly concern itself with manifestations of statistical biases in the real world – the survivor bias is a particular example of this. A lot of the writing here will be strongly influenced by the writings of Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Benoît Mandelbrot and Karl Popper amongst others as well as statical linguistics and datamining.
You might find the following brief study on stock returns interesting. It touches on survivorship bias and randomness in ways not normally discussed.
Click to access TrendingStocksDriveTheMarket.pdf
or
http://systematicrelativestrength.com/2009/06/02/the-minority-that-matter/