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can you explain? What does survivorship bias have to do with that
Herbaceous gymnosperms were likely outcompeted by early angiosperms because they were tasty.
It’s an old WW2 story. They were trying to improve their bullets thus analysed the returning planes which had collected many. By siphoning the bullets out of the frame they could see which ones had the most luck, and could then manufacture luckier bullets.
^ Channeling Slaughter House 5
American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter plans flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
thanks haha, I’m asking about the gymnosperms
It’s an old WW1 or WW2 story. They were constantly trying to improve their planes and thus analyzed the returning planes to figure out where they needed more protection. However, as the story goes, they did not account for the fact that the bullet holes where only in non-critical spots, because the planes that got hit on critical spots did not come back.
thanks! but I meant the gymnosperms
The gymnosperms also did not survive the anti-aircraft fire.
What does this mean?
only the woody things survive, because they’re woody and thus pretty difficult to put in a salad
People put pine nuts in salads all the time, and rodents do as well. It’s also one of the 5 ingredients of pesto.
And why the airplane?
…what kind of pine nuts are you eating? the ones i’ve eaten are just seeds, not made of wood. i wouldn’t want bark or wood chips in a salad, would you?
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.
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
yeah but you don’t eat the pinecone lol, you pry it apart to get to the non-wooden bit, because basically the only things that eat wood are fungi and beavers.
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.
Survivorship bias.
Gorm!
