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Note that the Wald story may not have actually happened: http://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fc-2016-06 http://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-c

• swyx 5y ago
  yes and here's some excellent metaresearch on the "measles plane" https://counting.substack.com/p/its-that-ds-meme-plane-with-dots https://counting.substack.com/p/its-that-ds-meme-plane-with-...
• ArnoVW 5y ago
  Aaaaaactually... in the postscript he sort of walks back everything. But since the article has mathematical and educational merit on its own, I guess he maintained it. "My indignation at how the internet dealt with Wald's work was overblown. Stephen Stigler (son of George, and a statistician at the University of Chicago) called my attention to a note by W. Allen Wallis himself in which he mentions Wald's work explicitly in connection with survivorship bias. Wallis' original article in the Journal of the American Statistical Association was followed by two very brief comments and then by a further 'rejoinder' of a bit more than one page. Towards the end of it he says, "The military was inclined to provide protection for those parts that on returning planes showed the most hits. Wald assumed, on good evidence, that hits in combat were uniformly distributed over the planes. It follows that hits on the more vulnerable parts were less likely to be found on returning planes than hits on the less vulnerable parts, since planes receiving hits on the more vulnerable parts were less likely to return to provide data. From these premises, he devised methods for estimating vulnerability of various parts." Amazing article btw. Thanks. This is what makes HN so unique.
• deleted 5y ago
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