One of the many reasons I love Munich is that everything is within walking distance. Always. Even after you’ve left the city center, hardly anything will demand more than 20 minutes of exercise from your legs.
Another reason is that those countless little trips from A to B are littered with stunning sights and beautiful buildings. “They don’t make ’em like this anymore,” my friends and I often agree when we look at yet another 100-year-old architectural masterpiece.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked myself, “why don’t we?” but today, after years of scratching my head, I can at least give you the answer. “I wish we still built houses like this,” it turns out, is a terrific example of survivorship bias. Because we do — we just haven’t torn down the ugly ones yet.
For any period of architecture, 100 years later, only the sturdiest and prettiest buildings will remain. By that time, everything else will either have collapsed or been rebuilt. It’s such a simple, perfectly logical, elegant explanation, and yet, it has escaped my mind for years.
That’s the nasty, distorting power survivorship bias can have — and it’s also why we should fight it wherever we encounter it. After all, not everything in life is as laissez-faire as a stroll around town.
