The Airport Delay Fallacy

journal.spencerwnelson.com

11 pointsspenczar54 comments

I see something similar happen in all kinds of support roles. E.g. a DBA complaining about how bad the developers were for using a database. It turns out about 95% never needed anything but minimal support. 4% needed regular handholding. 1% did all kinds of stupid things, causing 90% of his support work. He only saw the worst devs.

That’s a normal looking distribution for a support job.

The DBA made the mistake of thinking that his job was to administer the database, when in fact the real job is to support the worst of the worst pain-in-the-ass developers.

Yep. But how many support people realize it?

Model as birth-death process, then this reveals as survivorship bias.

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