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The survivorship-bias diagram of a WWII bomber seen from above, riddled with red bullet holes. On the inner wings, some of the holes spell LG and TM. Red labels point to clusters of holes: timeout, malformed JSON, rate limited (429), schema mismatch. Black arrows point to the clean spots with no holes: confidently wrong and plausible but false at the engines, skipped a step at the nose, right answer, wrong question at the gun turret, made-up citation and said it was done along the rear fuselage, quietly dropped a field at the tail. Caption: you can only improve what you can measure

You Can Only Improve What You Can Measure

After the survivorship-bias plane by Martin Grandjean (vector), McGeddon (picture) and the US Air Force (hit plot)CC BY-SA 4.0

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Appears in Reliable Machines From Unreliable Parts

Transcript

The survivorship-bias bomber, covered in bullet holes, some of them spelling LGTM across the inner wings.

The holes are the loud errors, the ones that get logged: timeout, malformed JSON, rate limited (429), schema mismatch.

The clean spots, where nothing got logged, are where the quiet ones hit: confidently wrong, plausible but false, skipped a step, right answer, wrong question, made-up citation, said it was done, quietly dropped a field.

“You can only improve what you can measure”