Post #276

society, chronic illness, survivorship bias "reading letters from 1818 is wild "its that time of the year when i get colds for no apparent reason again” have some clairitin hon But also we're not becoming allergic to everything nowadays like certain white moms fear. Allergies have always existed. They were just talked about differently Like "oh clams always ~turn my stomach~". Or "what a pity he was taken from us at age 5" "Well we didn't have all this fancy chronic illness stuffin the Olden Days, what did people do then??" They died, Ashleigh. This is a picture tracking bullet holes on Alied planes that encountered Nazi anti-aircraft fire in WW2. At first, the military wanted to reinforce those areas, because obviously that's where the ground crews observed the most damage on returning planes. Until Hungarian-born Jewish mathematician Abraham Wald pointed out that this the damage on the planes that made it home, and the Alies should armor the areas where there are no dots at all,because those are the places where the planes won't survive when hit. This phenomenon is called survivorship bias, a logic error where you focus on things that survived when you shouid really be looking at things that didn't. We have higher rates of mental illness now? Maybe that's because we've stopped killing people for being "possessed” or "witches” Higher rate of allergies? Anaphylaxis kills,and does so really fast if you don't know what's happening. Higher claims of rape? Maybe victims are less afraid of coming forward. These problems were all happening before, but now we've reinforced the medical and social structures needed to help these people survive. And we stil have a long way to go."