Survival bias

[ZenRaiden]

This is probably the most important concept that stood out to me, when thinking about virtually any topic, subject, situation or pretty much any problem ever.

Here is pretty simple and good explanation of this.

Survivorship bias - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Now I have seen people on the internet throw around the term survival bias nonchalantly and I think most people have no clue what it actually means or implies.

Survival bias can be applied to wars, history, strategies, algorithms, taking a shit, dieting, rocket engineering, technology at large, statistics, tooth fairy, and even comedy, or hollywood crappaton we have today, as well as pretty much cutting your nails and fashion.

Basically to put this simply the bias is we tend to overlook the parts that matter, in favor of the parts that get hit the most.

So lets say the guy in front of you is boxing you in the kindey a lot and it hurts a lot, and you start protecting it, and you get hit into the face and get knocked out.

I feel like this a lot of life.

The Hollywood thing is pretty obvious too, the scripting of new movies has fallen more flat than plate.

Here is how I think about the movie scripting.

Each movies business idea is about catching wider audience and getting more people to buy the commodity, in this sense the idea is getting more people to watch movies, by introducing the most viral themes into each movie, be it over the top CGI, intuitive themes, like quantum quantum something, pushing agenda of shock and mystery to the point of absurd, LGBT +++ whatever even if it has no substance or point just to be forcefully inclusive, giving more space to blacks, even though the characters have no personality, forcing new age social cults of feminism, absurd takes on novelty, rehashing old ideas, but rebranding them to look new - because it worked a ton before, space cadet genius super complex nobodies, pan pacific bullshit mixed with meta fix, absurd over the top preachy themes hidden in cellophane wrapper of new social paradigms, etc etc etc etc ad cretenia.

So how is survival bias applicable to movies if they used all these themes.
Well I think you kind of already understood this, but just in-case it has not hit you yet, none of the themes that made previous movies watchable and good, were actually important.

ET is not a good movie because there is an alien.
Rocky babloa is not famous for hitting hard, and getting up.
Movie like Rambo was not great, because the guy shot everyone.
Movie like Star Wars was not a beloved franchise because han solo said something cool.

Essentially the commodity lost the part most important for a good movie, and the same happened in music industry.
I can listen to the crappiest song in the 60s and its still better than what I hear today.

Same with history. We tend to look at what works, but genuinely nothing in history actually worked. That is not to say people in the past had not achieved many great things, but most of them just died all the fucking time.
People were actually terrible at civilization.

Same goes for economy. Don't tell me how Warren buffet is rich or how many people can afford a TV. Tell me how many people die of hunger and you never even had a statistic to begin with. Its actually impossible to make statistics about poverty. We literally don't know how many people die in streets of new york or how many people die overall in any country. We only look at glittering prizes.

 

[Black Rose]

SB = I was lucky but it feels like I was I had an advantage

Movie like Star Wars was not a beloved franchise because han solo said something cool.

Essentially the commodity lost the part most important for a good movie, and the same happened in music industry.
I can listen to the crappiest song in the 60s and its still better than what I hear today.

Yes, the corporatization of media and entertainment has a backdrop of mediocrity because they (the industry) are looking for a big hit that only happens when people are being creative that cannot be replicated just by copy-pasting old stuff in combinations. - they only look at stats and figures but cannot duplicate creativity.

Creativity is not an industrial product of mass production. It is meaningful. Someone put effort into it, good or bad qualities. Nowadays if it gets below a certain point in popularity it is canceled and not allowed to try. I keep hearing how fan theories killed Star Wars. No, what happened was the story did not make the actors follow character development. They did not grow or learn anything, sh*t just happened because "Cool Theory" was what the poles said people wanted to see. It had nothing to do with race or gender or fans theories, it was corporatized so it sucked. No character development = no meaning.

Nowadays day they are the same with A.I. - the styles are all the same. They merge all the uniqueness into an average blog of consumer-ready products and that is why A.I. art is not good but sells. The good thing is that a.i. can be tailored more so to what specific people want in seconds with hundreds of dollars instead of wasting millions over months. It is possible to make them a.i. you personally want without the mediocrity of brand name systems.

In what can be done things become personalized so people do get what they want and need eventually. I went to the intake today and will get a qualified therapist.

 

[ZenRaiden]

Creativity is not an industrial product of mass production. It is meaningful. Someone put effort into it, good or bad qualities. Nowadays if it gets below a certain point in popularity it is canceled and not allowed to try. I keep hearing how fan theories killed Star Wars. No, what happened was the story did not make the actors follow character development. They did not grow or learn anything, sh*t just happened because "Cool Theory" was what the poles said people wanted to see. It had nothing to do with race or gender or fans theories, it was corporatized so it sucked. No character development = no meaning.

Yeah that pretty much is what happened. Mash up crap.

 

[ZenRaiden]

Creativity is not an industrial product of mass production. It is meaningful. Someone put effort into it, good or bad qualities. Nowadays if it gets below a certain point in popularity it is canceled and not allowed to try

Lot of shows I started viewing and got chopped. I don't know.
Many of them had pretty good go at something, and I felt immersed.
What I can say for sure, old movies, somehow have the soft touch, reliability of character and plot that is just missing today.
I watched few movies lately and I just could not immerse my self in them.
You cannot feel engaged and immersed in a fantasy that feels wrong on some level or even all levels.

 

[dr froyd]

lol im not sure i understood the examples, but one way it has been applied to music (which makes sense but not necessarily the entire explanation) is as follows:

the reason all music from, say, 60s sounds good, is not that they generally made better music but that the good music has been filtered down to us, while all the bad stuff has been buried in the vast pool of oblivion.

and sure enough, I've heard some absolutely terrible psychedelic rock stuff from that era, which is totally obscure stuff very few know of. And I think if you look for the best modern-day music overall, not just among pop music, then the best music you'll find will be better than the best music from the 60s. But was pop music, specifically, better in the 60s? Well, compare for example The Doors to Taylor Swift... nuff said

 

[Black Rose]

Now I have seen people on the internet throw around the term survival bias nonchalantly and I think most people have no clue what it actually means or implies.

Survival bias can be applied to wars, history, strategies, algorithms, taking a shit, dieting, rocket engineering, technology at large, statistics, tooth fairy, and even comedy, or hollywood crappaton we have today, as well as pretty much cutting your nails and fashion.

I just went to the bathroom, lost a couple of pounds in the toilet, and yet I survived.

I can't stop laughing.

 

[ZenRaiden]

lol im not sure i understood the examples, but one way it has been applied to music (which makes sense but not necessarily the entire explanation) is as follows:

the reason all music from, say, 60s sounds good, is not that they generally made better music but that the good music has been filtered down to us, while all the bad stuff has been buried in the vast pool of oblivion.

and sure enough, I've heard some absolutely terrible psychedelic rock stuff from that era, which is totally obscure stuff very few know of. And I think if you look for the best modern-day music overall, not just among pop music, then the best music you'll find will be better than the best music from the 60s. But was pop music, specifically, better in the 60s? Well, compare for example The Doors to Taylor Swift... nuff said

This is all valid, but......... quality and quantity are two axis......
the thing is filtering effect is kind of like smaller rocks in the bottle always end up at the bottom and the big ones are at the top, for sure.
The trouble is today there is this spam culture, where money is gotten by spamming that one thing that seems to work best.
SO generally I think old bands had to be good to get to shine. The crappy ones were tiny and stayed that way.
Today you can spam mediocrity with good marketing tricks ad nauseam enough that even mediocre things get viral.
There is also a kind of try hard thing where you get people like Jimmy Hendrix, but just because he was using both hands and was left handed and did weird stuff with guitar does not mean people torture themselves with listening to him. He may have been genius, but his genius probably was not something normal people want to listen to. So you can kyle minogue and she can reach more people.

So the world of music today, is that the general trend is music that could be made by anyone, even average Joe can potentially hit the market and get super viral.
So at this point a song like Hello from other side by that chubby girl is tearing peoples ear drums, despite the fact she probably has more talent and skill than that, and also who cares? Its like it hit the radio charts anyway, despite the song being completely horrible on radio. Like that song would have been beautiful live, but in a car radio its shit.
So what are the hits of music today that make it go down in flames, and what makes songs coast on the wave of viral vibes and not get flak and burn down into oblivion?

 

[ZenRaiden]

I just went to the bathroom, lost a couple of pounds in the toilet, and yet I survived.

I can't stop laughing.

LOL.

 

[Black Rose]

So what are the hits of music today that make it go down in flames, and what makes songs coast on the wave of viral vibes and not get flak and burn down into oblivion?

Instead of listening to music I dislike I search for music I like and this makes it possible to do data analysis to search all music for stuff I like via the bot algorithms.

Same for movies or any form of media.

Because all media has become personalized and no one has a monopoly on popularity anymore.