{"id":2909,"date":"2007-12-19T14:15:35","date_gmt":"2007-12-19T08:45:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200712\/survival-bias-in-home-appliances\/"},"modified":"2009-03-05T10:42:20","modified_gmt":"2009-03-05T05:12:20","slug":"survival-bias-in-home-appliances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200712\/survival-bias-in-home-appliances\/","title":{"rendered":"Survival Bias in Home Appliances"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Dilip D&#8217;Souza <a href=\"http:\/\/dcubed.blogspot.com\/2007\/12\/what-brought-us-here.html\">documents<\/a> his recent misfortunes in home appliances and implies, (but as is typical for him, never says) that the quality of appliances has declined since the glorious period of Nehruvian socialism. That reminds me of a Fark.com discussion thread I was hanging around in a couple of months back when the bridge collapsed in Minnesota. I can&#8217;t be bothered to find the thread right now, but here is what I remember.<\/p>\n<p>Someone on the thread had brought up the example of Roman bridges. Why is it that bridges built by the Romans are still standing, while bridges built in modern times collapse within two decades?<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>An engineer had given the right answer. Engineering is an inexact science. It was inexact then and is inexact now. Our knowledge of the mathematics involved in planning for failure has vastly improved, but even the best maths can only statistically predict failure.<\/p>\n<p>So the engineers of those times built their bridges based on their guesses for how much cement was required. Some of the estimates were too low. Those bridges collapsed soon and we don&#8217;t hear of them. The ones that were too high stood much after they were needed and they stand now. We mistakenly consider them a monument to engineering feats when we should really consider them monuments to waste.<\/p>\n<p>This phenomenon of us remembering only what has survived and forgetting what does not has a name. It is called Survival Bias.\u00a0 The thing about home appliances is that the defective ones expose their problems quite early in their lives. They fail and they are replaced; and people tend to forget those. The ones that survive last long. People grow to love them, take them as representative of past generations and compare them with the defective ones that are failing right now.<\/p>\n<p>And oh,\u00a0what is true about home appliances is true about people too. &#8220;People in those days were so healthier!&#8221; is actually another way of saying &#8220;The unhealthy people in those days used to die.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dilip D&#8217;Souza documents his recent misfortunes in home appliances and implies, (but as is typical for him, never says) that the quality of appliances has declined since the glorious period of Nehruvian socialism. That reminds me of a Fark.com discussion thread I was hanging around in a couple of months back when the bridge collapsed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[42,277],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2909"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2909"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3214,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2909\/revisions\/3214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}