Survivorship Bias and Quince - a revisit
...there are no winners in a game that kills tadpoles and other small aquatic life.
Glancing at my previous ‘quince’ post reminded me of Survivorship Bias, a logic error where the characteristics of survivors is focused on more than what is different between the survivors and non-survivors.
Quince recipe ideas and cooking How-to’s with a focus on traditional uses in the area of Palestine: The Best Ways to Use Quince in Home-Cooking, msn.com. Quince are a pear/apple like ancient fruit which needs to be cooked to be edible and turns pink during cooking due to anthocyanin content (similar to pomegranate polyphenols). They grow in the Middle East/Palestine area and are used more commonly in Middle East and European areas than in the US. Look for them in specialty produce markets in autumn or winter or as jam/fruit preserves throughout the year.
Traditionally the seeds are cooked with the fruit preserves and then strained or picked out. The seeds are coated with a pectin rich mucilaginous layer which helped ‘set’ or thicken the fruit preserves for ancient jam makers. The technique is mentioned in this recipe: Quince jam - Taste of Beirut, tasteofbeirut.com
Quince Jam - Hadias Lebanese cuisine: hadiaslebanesecuisine.com. This recipe adds Mastic Seeds instead, info about the Mastic tree, resin and seeds and how to grow the tree: Mastic Tree – Experimental Farm Network Seed Store, store.experimentalfarmnetwork.org
Survivorship Bias in the CoV era…
Patterns speak when you listen, patterns show you the path when you look.
Lots of bullet holes? Better reinforce those areas of the planes…
“Wait, reverse that.” - Willy Wonka
Patterns that are non-random suggest causal relationships of some sort exist. In the case of the airplanes, the engines, the cockpit, the tail, and the midpoint of the wings had no bullet holes on surviving airplanes not because of coincidence but because being shot in those areas would have caused the plane to crash. Reinforcement was needed in the areas that didn’t have bullet holes.
Surviving CoV era — fresh air, sunshine, nicotine, horseradish, and avoid hospitals…. really?
Sadly, Scott Adams, the cartoonist who created the Dilbert series, has shared that he has the sudden metastasized prostate cancer and expects to die soon due to the rapid progression to Stage IV. He stated that ‘anti-vaxxers’ were right, he was wrong, and anti-vaxxers are the ‘winners’ now, due to their not trusting government. Survivorship in part is not accepting standard answers, or not accepting a ‘nocebo’ death sentence.
I don’t agree that anyone is a ‘winner’ in CoV era as it self-spreads to non-injected people and has been shown to harm species in the environment like tadpoles and other small aquatic life. Human embryos have a ‘tadpole’ like stage during very early development. Sperm are also ‘tadpole’ like. Infertility seems to be a consequence of CoV era. The human race may survive this era, but we are unlikely to survive it unchanged as gene changes have been found—the mRNA vials were shown to have DNA too and people have been found still making chimeric spike years after their injection/s.
We are not in old Kansas anymore, Toto, we are in the Emerald City of CoV Era. The only winners may be the billionaires who increased their wealth significantly—but is money really a win if life on Earth becomes chimeric spiked?
Thankfully we can eat some quince or horseradish and try not to worry about what cannot be undone. Pomegranate peel would probably help Scott Adams and Dr. Maki’s protocol with Ivermectin and fenbendazole. What likely won’t help is standard cancer industry methods… statistics don’t show a strong survivorship bias towards standard care.
“Smoking cigarettes is bad, um kay.” Nicotine lozenges are safer.
—South Park guidance counselor, paraphrased.
In CoV era, the lesson would be to look at differences between people who have survived and those who have passed away or became severely ill. Smoking cigarettes was predicted to increase risk of worse illness but that didn’t turn out to be supported by statistics. Smokers seemed to have a survivorship edge. Obesity on the other hand is clearly linked to increased risk in CoV era. Getting the CoV injections has been associated with worse fertility, cognitive health, and cardiovascular health.
*Check my archives for posts on these topics.
Horseradish and other Nrf2 promoters
Eating horseradish regularly seems to be associated with survivorship. Nrf2 promoting foods like horseradish would be helping to counteract the increase in NfKb and decrease in Nrf2 and glutathione. Polyphenols are Nrf2 promoters generally and reduce inflammatory NF-kB pathways too. Turmeric is an Nrf2 promoter, ginger, omega-3 fatty acids, and medicinal mushrooms. Many things can help, but you likely won’t be provided any of those within a standard medical setting.
Hospitals vs homelessness…. in the CoV era: Homelessness has the survivorship edge.
Oddly…. CoV era showed that becoming a patient in a hospital seemed to have the worst ‘survivorship’ and homeless people weren’t dying in the streets from CoV/plague. Odd times.
Bubble Tea and Bifidobacterium
Nations that tend to drink a lot of Bubble Tea (Bifidobacterium supporting tapioca pearls in sweetened tea) were noted in 2020 by a meme-r to have better survival rates against the ‘novel CoV’. The pattern seemed like a causal relationship to me at the time and I saved the graphic. Later work by Dr. Sabine Hazan proved that CoV was knocking out Bifidobacterium. Check my archives for butyrate and see: Resistant Starch/Butyrate for the Bubble Tea meme, (jenniferdepew.com).
Pectin would help te gut microbiome and also reduces risk from elevated galectin-3. Rhubarb also is beneficial due to its fiber and polyphenol content, and iodine probably too. Rhubarb is a plant that preferentially takes up more iodine from the soil than other plants.
AI summary with some edits and additions by me (I like Encyclopedias).
DeepSeek AI, (edited slightly): Survivorship Bias: A Summary of the Logical Error
Definition: Survivorship bias is a logical error where we focus only on the "survivors" (successes, visible data, or existing examples) while ignoring the "non-survivors" (failures, missing data, or dropouts). This leads to overly optimistic conclusions or wrong conclusions, because the full picture isn’t considered. What would the missing data have showed?
Key Points:
Flawed Reasoning:
We study only the winners (e.g., successful companies, healthy people, surviving artifacts) and ignore the losers (failed businesses, deceased patients, broken objects).
This skews analysis → false patterns or misleading success factors.
Famous Examples:
WWII Planes: Statisticians only studying bullet holes in returning aircraft, suggested reinforcing those areas. But the unseen damage (on planes that didn’t return) was the real vulnerability. *More below.
Business Books: "Secrets of successful CEOs" ignore failed CEOs who used the same strategies.
Stock Market: Only successful funds are advertised; failed ones disappear from records.
Why It Matters:
Leads to overconfidence (e.g., "This diet works!"—ignoring those it failed).
Distorts risk assessment (e.g., "Entrepreneurship is easy" if you only hear from survivors).
Impacts scientific research (e.g., studying only living patients with a disease misses fatal cases).
How to Avoid It:
Ask: "What’s missing?" Actively seek out hidden data (failures, dropouts, silent evidence).
Control for attrition: In studies, track participants who quit or didn’t survive.
Question success stories: "Did others try this and fail? Why?"
Bottom Line:
Survivorship bias tricks us into believing success is more predictable or common than it is. To think critically, always look for the invisible graveyard of failures.
~~
Reinforcing areas of survivor airplanes that had the most bullet holes would have left the critical areas of the planes vulnerable still. The key question was really “Where were there no bullet holes on the survivor airplanes?” … Non-surviving airplanes likely got shot in those areas of the plane, like maybe the engine housing. The areas with bullet holes on the survivor airplanes would be areas of the plane that were least critical to the plane being able to make it back, those bullets didn’t bring the plane down was the important message. It was the areas of the planes that hadn’t been hit which revealed where additional reinforcement was needed.
~~
DeepSeek AI: The person who identified the bullet hole pattern in WWII aircraft and recognized the flaw in reinforcing only the damaged areas was Abraham Wald, a mathematician and statistician working with the Statistical Research Group (SRG) at Columbia University during World War II.
Key Details About Abraham Wald's Insight:
The Problem:
The military wanted to reinforce armor on bombers to reduce losses.
They initially proposed adding armor to the areas with the most bullet holes (wings, fuselage) because those were the most frequently damaged on returning planes.
Wald's Counterintuitive Realization:
He pointed out that the missing data—the planes that didn’t return—held the answer.
The lack of bullet holes in certain areas (e.g., engines, fuel systems) on surviving planes meant those were fatal hits—planes struck there were lost in combat.
The Solution:
Wald recommended armoring the untouched areas (where no bullet holes appeared on survivors) because those were the critical vulnerabilities. *He looked at an overlap of all the bullet holes on planes that had made it back, had survived, and there were clearly a few key areas of the surviving airplanes that had no bullet holes at all….meaning ZERO airplanes had made it back with damage in those critical areas and therefore those were the areas needing reinforcement not the areas of the plane that had withstood bullet damage.
Why It Matters:
Wald’s work is a classic example of survivorship bias and revolutionized applied statistics.
His approach is now foundational in fields like risk analysis, engineering, and data science.
Fun Fact:
Wald was a Jewish refugee from Hungary who fled Nazi persecution—making his contributions to the Allied war effort even more historically poignant. chat.deepseek.com/a/cha…
Disclaimer: This information is being provided for educational purposes within the guidelines of Fair Use and is not intended to provide individual health care guidance.