Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

DuxAvalonia t1_iwwy5eo wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in [OC] The business track record of Elon Musk by born_in_cyberspace

The survivorship bias of the sample is ridiculous. This track record is only amazing because it is only tracking the relative successes and it’s leaving out a number of ventures he put his money into…

…it’s observational selection.

1

[deleted] t1_iwwyawj wrote

If you fail 10 times and the 11th you found a billion dollar company you're still a success..

3

DuxAvalonia t1_iwx09t2 wrote

You can still call him successful if you want. However, you called this an objectively amazing track record. I am pointing out (as are many others) that this is not the complete track record. This is a sample put together with clear bias. If I made a chart of all of quarterback’s performance in the last two minutes of football games but I only included games when he led game-winning drives, then I am not fairly presenting data.

This is not even a principle of data science. This is basic informal logic at a middle-school level.

People aren’t attacking it because it’s about Musk. People are attacking it because it’s an unethical and inaccurate presentation of Musk and a few Musk fanboys don’t have the logical or critical thinking chops to make the distinction.

1

[deleted] t1_iwx0hrh wrote

You're delusional if you don't think this is about Musk specifically.

1

DuxAvalonia t1_iwx390z wrote

The part that is about Musk specifically is that as he reveals his total lack of competence in managing Twitter, a fan of his presented inaccurate and skewed data to try to prop him up. Then, as the obvious errors are called out, people who are part of his cult are using phrases like “objectively amazing” to describe things that are neither objective nor amazing.

Even your own response to my initial comment didn’t acknowledge the error in the graph, it just moved the goalposts. Do you really not see that?

1