Survivorship bias is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that "survived" some process and ignoring those that didn't. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. It can lead to the false belief that the successes in a group have some special property, rather than being just lucky.
Examples:
- TheTwelveSimpleSecretsOfMicrosoftManagement (How many companies follow those 12 rules and never achieve even a fraction of the money MicroSoft has?)
- Since I (or the people I know) have built projects for XX years and never needed feature XXXX (Object orientation, Full Relational Model Support, Structured Programming, Functional Programming, Garbage Collection, etc), nobody (or the majority) needs it for any project.
- Since I (or the people I know) have built projects for XX years and always needed feature XXXX (Object orientation, Full Relational Model Support, Structured Programming, Functional Programming, Garbage Collection, etc), everybody (or the majority) needs it for all projects.
- Since I (or the people I know) have built projects for XX years and never had problem XXXX (for example, one or all of the SqlFlaws), nobody (or the majority) has such problems ever.
SurvivorBias might just be an example on the flaws of InductiveReasoning
"Coalition: Vast Majority Of Iraqis Still Alive" --TheOnion
See also TheCemeteryOfUnknowns, InAllMyYearsIveNever