Survivorship bias ================= What is survivor bias? ---------------------- According to Wikipedia, `Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not `__. In the context of this book, the point is that the supervisors and academic leadership is a biased sample of the audience which they are leading. Survivor bias in academia ------------------------- * How many equally-qualified people didn't make it, so that you could? * How many jobs are gotten by "waiting around until you get it"? * Are group leaders representative of junior researchers? * Not everyone can afford to wait around for something to come up. This biases who can even think about getting a job. * Do you need to think more about how others are experiencing in their careers? Reducing survivor bias ---------------------- * I probably can't say much here - others probably comment on things much better than I could. * Be aware that it exists. Make sure that there are other role models and you put in extra effort to understanding experiences that are different than yours. * The next chapter, :doc:`future-careers`, discusses this more.