You only ever see the winners — the graveyard of identical strategies that failed is silent and uncounted.
Note how much of the advice literature is built from interviews with survivors, including several books in this library that warn you about exactly this.
Links
Typed edges. Anything below the line was authored on the other note and derived here.
supports →Given enough participants, spectacular track records appear by chance alone — success is evidence of skill only after you count the entrants.Supplies the mechanism: the sample you reason from was filtered by the very outcome you are trying to explain.
← extended byThe record was written by what survived — the failures that would refute the thesis left no documents.
Generalises the market version into an epistemological one: not just missing data points, but entire categories of evidence that were never recorded because the recorders drowned.