survivorship bias and thrift store clothes👕

We're back after one glorious month of re-runs. I bet you were just fine without me while I was forlornly sitting here, saving links with nowhere to put them. Well, not anymore! Even as people continue trying to gin up panic about whether people are being "forced" to eat too much protein, I, who have forgotten more than anyone else I know knows about protein, sit here ever moisturized, ever unbothered.

Programming note: After this week, we will be shifting the free weekly She's A Beast newsletter to Mondays. The premium-tier Ask A Swole Womans will continue to arrive on Sunday evenings.

There is a famous image that circulates on the internet, a diagram of a plane with a pattern of dots mapped onto it. It represents an analysis done by a statistician during World War II of planes that returned to base after getting hit by enemy fire, where they had been hit and how often. There are two ways to interpret this diagram. One would be to say that planes tend to get hit in the mapped spots, so we should reinforce them. Another would be to say that we are only able to map damage on planes that actually make it back; we might infer that all the planes that are going down are actually getting hit where the returning planes are undamaged. The second way is the (more) correct way; the first way represents survivorship bias, or the mistaken belief that everything that remains after a given event tells the whole story of that event.