But... in a field where being bad at your job is fatal, is it really a fallacy?
Serious question - just like quoting an expert in the relevant topic isn't an appeal to authority, etc.
Serious question - just like quoting an expert in the relevant topic isn't an appeal to authority, etc.
In the same way, an appeal to an authority is better than nothing, but its still a really weak argument. You can misunderstand authorities and authority can be mistaken or suborned. Its a reasonable argument if nobody knows much about the topic, but its never convincing if people are learned in the topic; the benefit of an expert is not that they are experts, its that they know how to defend their position with reasoning. As the motto of the royal society says "Nullius in verba".
"Beware old men in a young man's game."
Edit: Nope I'm wrong, just redid the math. Apologies.
Survivorship bias is a bias because the sample is biased - Its when you pick a group of people who have already won and then are surprised that they beat the odds and won because you confuse the probability that a specific person wins with the probability that at least 1 person wins.
To get a good estimate of this you need to come up with some priors about how many skilful and unskillful equivalents there were at the age of 30 and how much worse the unskillful ones are at staying alive.
I meant if you meet X people at a random point in their career then on average more than half will make it to the end because some of the original sample died before you sampled the population. Basically older people would have a lower chance of their luck running out even if they where all equally incompetent.
At least assuming the original population isn’t dying of something else vastly more often etc.
The credentials of the expert don't determine whether or not the statement is an appeal to authority.