The image is a reference to this analysis done in World War II, which might seem to suggest that the planes need more armour on the wings and tail, but actually shows that these areas aren’t important and that the engines and cockpit need armour if the plane is to survive to make it back to base (where the stats are correlated).
The surviving planes showed a bias in the data that leads to an incorrect conclusion, just like the surviving woody gymnosperms makes it seem like there weren’t non-woody gymnosperms.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
only the woody things survive, because they’re woody and thus pretty difficult to put in a salad
edinbruh@feddit.it 1 day ago
People put pine nuts in salads all the time, it’s also one of the 5 ingredients of pesto.
And why the airplane?
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
…what kind of pine nuts are you eating? the ones i’ve eaten are just seeds, not made of wood
the plane is a classic example of survivor bias: only the planes that didn’t get shot in critical areas returned, but at first the response was to add armor to the places that got shot the most, which is the wrong action since clearly if they got shot that much it didn’t really matter for the survival of the plane.
edinbruh@feddit.it 1 day ago
The pine nuts are the seeds that are inside the pine cones. The pinecone being wooden clearly didn’t stop us from prying them apart and eating it’s content