Survivorship bias

Survivorship bias: (ref en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias) A type of selection bias.  It is a logical falacy used in argumentation or explanation (ref: read-weep.com/#!/episode.php/the-secret) the (false) explanation for good performance.  It is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that "survived" some process and inadvertently overlooking those that didn't because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. The survivors may literally be people, as in a medical study, or could be companies or research subjects or applicants for a job, or anything that must make it past some selection process to be considered further.  Example: Survivorship bias can lead to overly optimistic beliefs because failures are ignored, such as when companies that no longer exist are excluded from analyses of financial performance.

History is written by the victors.

Relationship to the Anthropic Principle.

This is a work in progress.

About McIAT

McIAT is the name I picked for my blogspot (mostly because it was short and available) to share my thoughts about the Hugh_Everett Multiverse, or MWI (Many Worlds Interpretation) of Quantum Mechanics, and how the Consciousness and Identity of an individual person (e.g. me) fit into that framework.  These are weighty philosophical topics which I don't presume to fully understand, so the purpose of this blog isn't to get to the bottom of, or push, any one idea but rather to explore the connections between ideas that at first seem disconnected.

This blog is about "what if" more than "what is", and so I am happy to have you discuss or argue with me the implications of an idea right up to suggesting that an idea implies something we both agree to be false, but please don't use logical fallacies (authority, ad hominym, false dichotomy, straw man, etc.).  Also, the blog lives in a world narrowed by key definitions listed on this page, and so I'm not willing to entertain certain objections to the definitions themselves, such as that they're simply wrong.  But feel free to suggest how changing the definitions will bear philosophical fruit!

In this blog,

• Multiverse means the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.  This is a view first popularized by Hugh Everett half a century ago, and which I swear I thought of all on my own before I heard of Mr. Everett, although it's more likely that the idea has made its way into popular culture (e.g. TTBOOK) and that's how I picked it up.  Used sensibly, this definition resolves key "paradoxes" (scare quotes perhaps not necessary because a paradox means not really a paradox) such as time loops (the watch in Somewhere in Time and the invention of Clear Aluminum in Star Trek 4), the grandfather paradox exploited by the Terminator), and most noteably the Scrodenger's Cat paradox.
• Consciousness means the awareness of experiences and feelings, having a sense of identity ("selfhood"), and it is the executive control system of the mind, i.e. self-awareness.
• Identity is the property of being the same thing, not just a copy.  ("Identical copy" is an oxymoron.)  "Identity" gets tricky when a thing (or person) changes over time.  Is a person's Identity preserved from cradle to grave?
• "All That" is the rest of the things that connect Multiverse, Consciousness, Identity, and closely related ideas such as Memory and Experience (and whether Memory and Experience are really the same thing!), and Recognition (Identity from a different point of view), as well as more distantly related ideas such as Probability, Cosmology, Theories of hidden dimensions (e.g. String Theory, and even to some extent Special Relativity), and most of all the relationships among these seemingly disparate areas of philosophy.

I will be happy to read your comments, especially if you speculate on where this kind of thinking might lead!