>>518878797 (OP)
Okay, so, during WW2 they did an analysis of the planes that came back from missions to see what improvements they could make to optimize things. What they found was that damaged planes usually came back with holes in the wings and tail wings, but not the engines, cockpit, or the main tail.
Their conclusion, based on this data, was that those places get hit more often, and thus they should move around the armor on the plane to protect those areas more while maintaining the same weight. When they tested this new configuration it was a massive failure: fewer planes came back at all to base.
This is why it is called 'survivorship bias'. Yes, the planes that made it back to base DID have most of their damage concentrated in the wings. Because those were the places that *could take damage and still make it home*. The spots where you don't see red dots on that image are the parts of the plane that, if you take damage there, you just fall out of the sky and never make it home for the engineers to examine. You can fly home with a hole in the wing, but not a hole in the engine.
The meme has since grown to incorporate a wider meaning beyond the original context where the way that the data is being analyzed or presented focuses on the people/events where a thing DID happen and not all of the cases where it DIDN'T happen. Like focusing on the handful of people who dropped out of highschool and then went on to be wildly successful to make a case for school not being important, which ignores the millions of other cases where people dropped out of school and never went anywhere. Only focusing on the survivors/success and not the failures which is where the actual data is.
