Analysing your IQ
Please Wait
AKA: "The Silent Cemetery"
The error of focusing on winners and ignoring the many failures you don’t see.
Survivorship Bias is one of the most common cognitive errors—and one of the hardest to spot in yourself. This page explains what it is, why your brain does it, and how to mitigate it.
You copy a famous founder’s habits and assume they caused success, ignoring thousands who did the same and failed.
Survivorship Bias isn't just an abstract concept—it affects real decisions about money, relationships, career, and health. The cost of ignoring it compounds over time.
This error is driven by Visibility is not representativeness; success is over-sampled in your attention..
The mechanism is rooted in visibility is not representativeness; success is over-sampled in your attention.. Your brain isn't broken—it's running outdated software in a new environment.
In investing: Survivorship Bias leads to holding losing positions too long or selling winners too early.
In relationships: This bias causes people to interpret ambiguous signals in ways that confirm existing beliefs about partners.
In work: Survivorship Bias makes it harder to update strategies when market conditions change.
In health: People ignore symptoms that contradict their self-image as "healthy" or "young."
Experiments on Survivorship Bias often use controlled conditions that make the bias obvious to observers—yet participants still fall for it. This demonstrates how powerful the effect is.
Ask: “Who is missing from this dataset?” Seek failure stories and base rates, not just highlight reels.
Seek disconfirming evidence: Actively look for data that challenges your current belief.
Use decision journals: Write down predictions before outcomes are known, then review accuracy.
Consult diverse perspectives: People with different backgrounds spot different biases.
Implement decision rules: Pre-commit to criteria before emotionally charged situations arise.
Time-box decisions: Revisit important conclusions after a cooling-off period.
Some brains are more susceptible to this than others. Test your Purpose to find out.
The error of focusing on winners and ignoring the many failures you don’t see.
The alternate name "The Silent Cemetery" captures the intuitive essence of the bias. Survivorship Bias is the formal psychological term, while "The Silent Cemetery" describes what it feels like in practice.
Ask: “Who is missing from this dataset?” Seek failure stories and base rates, not just highlight reels.
The underlying mechanism is visibility is not representativeness; success is over-sampled in your attention.. Human brains evolved heuristics for speed and survival, not accuracy in modern contexts.
Yes. Intelligence doesn't provide immunity—sometimes it makes the bias worse because smart people are better at rationalizing. Awareness and structured decision processes are more protective than raw IQ.
You copy a famous founder’s habits and assume they caused success, ignoring thousands who did the same and failed.