Selection Bias

 
A couple of years ago I took a course on the use of statistics in psychology.* The following paragraph has stuck with me longer and *sharper* than almost anything I've read since.

 
      Wainer (1999) tells a story from World War II that reminds us of the sometimes perverse aspects of selection bias. He describes an aircraft analyst who was trying to determine where to place extra armor on an aircraft based on the pattern of bullet holes in the returning planes. His decision was to put the extra armor in the places that were free of bullet holes on the returning aircraft that he analyzed. His reasoning was that the planes had probably been pretty uniformly hit with bullets. Where he found the bullet holes on the returning aircraft told him that, in those places, the plane could be hit and still return.

- Stanovich; How to Think Straight About Psychology (7)

 
When I think of it currently, I'm almost certain that tangled in this idea is a thick and twisty piece of meta on alternate universes. DCU, because that's where I am, and the universes that exist beside it in canon and in fandom. The ones we read about, the ones we write. The ones we don't.

Or possibly just an essay on Tim Drake.

 

*A course usually taken by Arts students who imagine they are on track to cutting up the brains of mice and such. I took it because I liked statistics and thought psychology was rather neat as an idea. Why *wouldn't* the two go great together!

The fact that my course picking logic has not really improved since then is a lot of the reason I don't have a pretty piece of paper yet.