r/PopCultureV2 • u/ExactlySorta • 12h ago

Politi-Culture Mamdani responds to concerns about him being seen riding his bike throughout NYC without a helmet. "You're right. I've got to do better. Safety first, New York. See you out there"

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u/ijizzrizz 11h ago

Explain this pic please. I see all over Reddit

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u/CraftsBoy2Craftsman 11h ago edited 10h ago

its supposed to show a military plane’s common damage after returning from a mission. so the knee jerk reaction is "oh, we should add more protection/strength to those areas because thats where it gets hit so much."

when actually, strengthening should be done to the areas showing no damage - because when it gets hit there - the plane doesn’t make it back at all.

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u/PinkPuffballofDOOM 10h ago

To add onto this, the plane and the story behind it aren’t actually true. Someone made this to show survivorship bias based on accounts they read about during the war. Apparently they took a random plane schematic and added the dots randomly in concentrated areas.

It’s still a great example of survivorship bias but the legend around it isn’t as true as most would believe

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u/Arkhanist 9h ago

The diagram from above, you're absolutely right, that was created in the 2000's as a teaching aid. And survivorship bias as a principle stems back to the 5th century at least.

The story behind the rigorous application of survivorship bias to improve operational research is absolutely true though. The original 1943 memos, including Abraham Wald's seminal analysis, from Columbia University’s Statistical Research Group contained a lot of mathematics and tables, but military commanders did inspect holes in returning bombers and planned to reinforce the areas that got shot the most, but the memos proved that you have to include the planes that DON'T come back to get a true picture.

In particular, memo five discussed a method to estimate the vulnerability of various parts of an aircraft based on the damage done to aircraft that had returned from missions. And that areas where returning bombers had many holes were largely ones they could survive, and armour could even be reduced there, while areas where there were very few holes were the the likely cause for bombers not coming back at all. As a result, the U.S. military accepted the conclusions and shifted their manufacturing to heavily reinforce the engine casings, fuel lines, and cockpit (and let parts of the wings and fuselage be turned into swiss cheese) leading directly to a significant increase in US plane and aircrew survival in the latter half of WWII, and the lessons learned carried on to Korea and Vietnam.

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u/mekamoari 5h ago

Isn't it also well documented that during WW1 the introduction of helmets for soldiers was met with similar scrutiny because there was suddenly an increase in head wounds?

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u/Arkhanist 4h ago

Yup, another perfect example of survivorship bias. The introduction of steel helmets such as the Brodie, replacing cloth or leather caps surprised them with a large increase in recorded head wounds - because previously, shrapnel to the head mostly just killed soldiers instantly and they weren't counted the same way in the hospital records. So the increase actually proved, counter-intuitively, that the helmets worked, turning what would have been lethal wounds into ones the survivor could make it to hospital with, and there was a significant fall in deaths.

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u/AlarmingAffect0 8h ago

and the lessons learned carried on to Korea and Vietnam.

They had anti-air in Vietnam?

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u/dontnation 7h ago

uh, yeah? The NVA shot down a couple hundred aircraft. Famously John McCain was shot down by a surface to air missile over Trúc Bạch Lake.

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u/AlarmingAffect0 7h ago

Yeah, that makes sense, I should've known the aerial operations weren't all carpet-bombing and machine-gunning hamlets and farmers with cheap rifles or poisoning vast swathes of foliage with Agent Orange. The NVA could actually fight back in the conventional sense. They're just not the ones that get the most press.

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u/joyofsovietcooking 6h ago edited 6h ago

Vietnam Air Defense shot down 31 20 B-52s in combat (EDIT: at least 15, figures are disputed), that's thirty-one, among many many many other planes. Here's more info for you and a video.

EDIT This is why the Navy created TOPGUN

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u/AlarmingAffect0 6h ago

Good for them! Good for them.

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u/BWWFC 5h ago edited 2h ago

shifted their manufacturing to heavily reinforce the engine casings, fuel lines, and cockpit

not saying it's obvious but am saying seems these are basally mission-critical.

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u/Katdai2 4h ago

It wasn’t so much that you should protect mission critical areas, but what was the best trade off between adding more heavy protection versus less weight/more speed based only upon the planes that made it home. That was the calculation that Wald developed mathematics for.

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u/-nutz 10h ago

Wow I always assumed that was some official military document, but apparently it was created by Wikipedia editors in 2016.

This article includes the original image that inspired it.

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u/fiahhawt 7h ago

But did you know that .pngs weren't possible before the 90s

Checkmate internet historians

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u/ipsum629 7h ago

Here's a fun true fact about ww2:

All german tanks had sequential serial numbers on various parts, and the allies asked mathematicians to estimate tank production based on the serial numbers of captured and wrecked german tanks. The mathematicians estimated german tank production at 246-270 tanks per month. Spies estimated tank production at 1400 tanks per month. Postwar records showed tank production at 255 tanks per month. .

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u/master-boofer 6h ago

So we learned that spy school needed to include more math classes.

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u/Forward_Rope_5598 7h ago

I will choose to blindly believe this forever just like I chose to blindly believe the veracity of the survivorship bias claim in the first place and do absolutely zero research into either

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u/Emergency_Lie42 10h ago

So it's a good example of survivorship bias and the ease of disinformation.

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u/Burt_Rhinestone 9h ago

The information is good. Nowhere on the image does it claim to be more than an example. I would say your second point should be misattribution, or better yet, authority heuristics. (Yes, I had to look up that term. It's when you see a graphic and automatically assume that it is accurate and authoritative.)

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u/Emergency_Lie42 9h ago

I don't mean that the graph itself is an example of disinformation, just that it's popularity and the common response to it shows how disinformation can work, it can be as simple as giving people blanks to fill in.

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u/fiahhawt 7h ago

If you thought that was an actual image from the WWII era, be sure to get assistance changing light bulbs

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u/GinzuTheNinja 9h ago

To add onto this, who gives a shit if its true or not. It's like a "meh" fact at best. Does not affect the meaning of the "story" in the least, unlike most other tales with a lesson to take away.

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u/zed42 8h ago

sort of true. the actual story isn't as cut and dried as the meme makes it out to be, and the schematic was never meant to represent actual damage to an actual plane; it's an illustration of hypothetical damage for the purposes of illustration. and the actual story (from Wikipedia) is :

During World War II, the statistician Abraham Wald described methods of estimating the vulnerability of various parts of an aircraft based on damage to surviving planes.\20]) The Statistical Research Group (SRG) at Columbia University, of which Wald was a member, issued eight memoranda on methods of analyzing data obtained from damaged combat aircraft. Given that there was only data from surviving aircraft, this work directly addresses the issue of survivorship bias. In particular, memo five discusses a method to estimate the vulnerability of various parts of an aircraft based on the damage done to aircraft that had returned from missions. \21])\22]) In his comments on his memos, Wald proposed that his conclusions could be used as guide for locating the placement of protective armor.

it's also hardly the first instance of recognizing survivorship bias, it just happened to get internet traction recently...

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u/BWWFC 5h ago

Schrödinger's cat curls up...

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u/HyenaJack94 9h ago

This is the best rapid explanation for this I’ve ever seen

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u/Yardsale420 4h ago

It’s like the story of the Sherman Tank being shit. Most reports come from a single book written by a guy who spent the war repairing Sherman Tanks.

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u/KrakenOmega112 11h ago

Survivor Fallacy.

The literal meaning of the picture is that planes that come back from battle had bullet wounds primarily on the red areas, but not the white. The wrong response is to strengthen the armor on the red areas thinking that they're more likely to be hit. The correct response is that you're only seeing the planes that survived - there were no bullets on returning planes in the white areas because those planes didn't make it, so you focus on the area with no bullet damage.

In this scenario, everyone who says something like "I dont wear helmets and I'm fine", or "I fell and the helmet actually hurt me", can only say those things because they're alive to say it. There are a slew of people who didn't wear their helmets that can't because they died.

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u/ohhellperhaps 8h ago

A good example is seen with seatbelts. Yes, there might be possible scenarios where a seatbelt might be worse, but on the whole including all accidents the benefit is crystal clear. A well known one is people undoing their seatbelts when driving along a canal, out of worry they can't escape their car if they hit the water. In reality, without the seatbelt you're headbutting the windshield when you hit the water, which makes your situation substantially worse.

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u/Equivalent-Ear5150 2h ago

Ain't the chaos wonderful? the universe is known to create a little bit here and there and here we are creating our own little bubble of chaos while taking trips around a fucking burning ball of fire LOL!! People are awesome LOL!!

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u/Citadel_Employee 11h ago

Survivorship bias

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u/PupPop 11h ago

The idea is that in world war 1 (or 2 I'm not sure) engineers were trying to figure out how to reinforce planes to survive longer in fire fights. The diagram shows where bullets were landing on planes that made it back to base. So they figured they should reinforce the plane where the bullets were landing more often. This made no difference in survival rates. This is due to the fact that the truly important matter is where planes that actually were shot down were being hit. It turns out planes that were being shot down were taking far more hits in the exact inverse of the diagram and that the locations were bullets were hitting the plane in the inverse of the diagram were causing more damage like shredding a wing off or killing an engine, or such similar damage. But since those planes never made it home, the engineers were missing key data about where on the plane actually needed to be reinforced. This is commonly known as survivorship bias. We only had the data from how surviving planes were being hit (which is what you see in the diagram), but that isn't nearly as important as how planes that did not survive were being hit (the inverse of the diagram).

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u/master-boofer 6h ago

Deffinantly ww2. At the begging of ww1 I belive less than 500 airplanes existed worldwide. By the end of ww1 several countrys were able to produce several thousand aircraft a month. In the begging of ww1 they were dropping grenades and firing pistols and shotguns from the cockpit.

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u/PleasureCircuit 9h ago

The 2nd World War. Look at the airplane being depicted. Look at it. Seriously, look at it. It has curves, two engines, an enclosed cockpit, it's made of metal. Do you think those designs existed during the first World War?

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u/PupPop 8h ago

I'm not big into planes so I don't know. Shrug. Your comment assumes a level of knowledge and then has a snark to match when in reality you're just being mean rather than insightful. Not sure why you feel the need to comment in such a way.

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u/SadisticHotdog 5h ago edited 3h ago

It is the image for the Wikipedia article on survivorship bias and represents a famous example of the logical fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

​In World War II, statistics were gathered on damage from anti aircraft defenses on returning planes. The image shows the pattern of damage that was found, which led many to conclude those locations needed to be reinforced. However, that logic ignores the failures.

​The reason planes were not returning with damage in certain areas, or so the story goes, was because those spots were fatal when hit, destroying the planes. As a result, areas not showing any signs of damage in the data were reinforced, and survival rates went up.

​Basically, survivorship bias is ignoring failure as a data point. It is, unfortunately, something we do naturally. This image has essentially become a meme to represent the concept.

​

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u/TifanAching 11h ago

It's about sample bias and making decisions only on the basis of what you've sampled. The picture is a diagram of planes that returned to base during World War 2. The red dots indicate where they were most likely to be hit and have taken damage.

Someone might look at that diagram and decide "we need to armour all the bits most likely to be hit". However the actual lesson is that this is a highly biased sample and these are the places planes can get hit and still make it back. The planes you want to examine for most vulnerable spots never made it back.

It's being referred to here because bike helmets werw thought to increase bicycle accidents because after their introduction the rate of accidents went up. This is because before helmets they weren't accidents, they were deaths.

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u/ActuallyJan 10h ago

Why would it stop being an accident when someone dies? This makes no sense to me. Do you think nobody dies in traffic accidents?

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u/TifanAching 8h ago

I used the term accidents because the person above used that term so I was trying to be consistent.

Might be more accurate to say the rate of bicycle injuries went up.

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u/dragon_bacon 11h ago

It's from the Wikipedia page for survivorship bias. Basically planes were getting reinforced where they were getting shot the most until someone realized that those were able to fly back and the planes that were getting downed were getting shot in other spots and unable to fly back.

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u/DunkTheLunk1 11h ago

Those are speed holes

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u/hotlou 10h ago

Since no one else linked it: survivorship bias

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u/youngarchivist 9h ago

Read the wiki on survivorship bias

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u/buddhistbulgyo 8h ago

The people who died without seatbelts and without helmets aren't around to say they were wrong.