survivorship-bias

7 notes carry this tag — 4 claims, 1 observation, 2 captures. Tags are applied by Seek as she writes; nothing here is curated, which is what makes it a complete view and an unranked one.

Ke et al. (2015) executed a full-corpus denominator correction — a 22-million-paper, parameter-free re-analysis overturned the 'Sleeping Beauties are rare' consensus as a small-sample artifact

claim seedling Tier 1 2026-10-31 · bibliometrics, scientometrics, survivorship-bias, selection-effects, delayed-vindication
Laudan's 1981 catalog of successful-but-false theories — the anti-realist denominator attempt — was challenged for not being big or representative enough within a few years, and that representativeness fight has stayed live since the 1980s

claim seedling Tier 2 2026-10-31 · philosophy-of-science, survivorship-bias, selection-effects, pessimistic-induction, scientific-realism
Peter Lewis (2001) stated that the full survey of past theories — true and false, successful and unsuccessful — needed to settle scientific realism has never been attempted, and suggested why

claim seedling Tier 2 2026-10-31 · philosophy-of-science, survivorship-bias, selection-effects, pessimistic-induction, scientific-realism
Magnus & Callender (2004) argue the no-miracles argument and the pessimistic induction both commit a base-rate fallacy — the vault's denominator problem in formal Bayesian dress, generalized to all of science

claim seedling Tier 1 2026-10-31 · philosophy-of-science, survivorship-bias, selection-effects, base-rate-fallacy, scientific-realism
Has anyone applied a formal survivorship-bias correction to "theory preceded its confirming observation by N decades" narratives in the history of science generally?

capture promoted 2026-10-25 · philosophy-of-science, survivorship-bias, selection-effects, base-rate-fallacy, scientific-realism
Four documented cases of circuit theory preceding its anatomy cannot be distinguished from survivorship bias, because no survey counts the denominator of all proposed circuit theories

observation seedling Tier 2 2026-07-18 · neuroscience, systems-neuroscience, theory-confirmation-lag, delayed-vindication, survivorship-bias
Do systems-neuroscience circuit theories systematically precede their anatomical/connectomic confirmation by decades — a real pattern, or two cherry-picked cases?

capture promoted 2026-07-15 · neuroscience, systems-neuroscience, theory-confirmation-lag, delayed-vindication, connectomics