File:Survivorship-bias.svg - Wikimedia Commons

A later reprinting of the "unillustrated report" referenced:

A_Reprint_Plane_Vulnerability.pdf

Even a 20mm autocannon round only has a ~50% chance of destroying a plane on an engine hit, as opposed to the ~100% assumption used for the illustration (I think the flak round statistics were per-fragment-hit and not per-shell)! Weird how few people were suspicious about a 100% loss rate for engine hits to a two-engine plane.

Speaking of which, there is no source for the example data, which is noted as "hypothetical" in the report. The hypothetical data set was for a 1000-plane raid on a single objective, which implies a strategic bombing mission context, and thus that the planes were 4-engine strategic bombers like the B-17 instead of the 2-engine bomber in the illustration (this is a nitpick, but I thought it was neat). There is also no exact hit location data, with [...]

---

First published:
September 30th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4Tcdwzum86fBCvxdG/the-famous-survivorship-bias-image-is-a-loose-reconstruction

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Simple metadata display showing date and source information.

Illustration showing damage survival rates on WW2 bomber, indicated by colors.

Aircraft diagram showing bullet damage pattern from World War II.

Table showing vulnerability statistics for aircraft hits from different weapon types.

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

“The famous survivorship bias image is a ‘loose reconstruction’ of methods used on a hypothetical dataset” by Lao Mein

LessWrong (30+ Karma)