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Comment by jcims | Hacker News Reader

Yeah my girls loved swimming in my in-laws pond behind their house. This ruined that. Statistically almost zero chance it will happen, but the ghost of the idea is there.

Especially when you see micrographs of the little demon: https://www.newsweek.com/brain-eating-amoebae-strike-again-t...

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I guess I should count myself lucky for the 'dangerous' things I got to do as a kid; it seems to be a thing of the past.

If you wanted to define 'survivorship bias' with a simple example, this would do it.

This really is a poor example. The vast majority of children who grew up doing "dangerous" activities are still alive and well. Survivorship bias is more often used when the chance of surviving is statistically lower than most people realize.

It's still survivorship bias. They're only happy about it because nothing bad occurred to them, while there really are kids that got sick and I bet they're much less positive about these dangerous things they got to do.

I didn't say it wasn't, just that it was a poor example of it as the vast majority of kids ended up okay.

Or Mercury handling, for another.

Maybe I overstated, they still swam, just a bit more freaked out.

if you know it's a ghost of an idea, then you should have the strength to overcome the irrational bias.

After all you almost certainly put them at more risk just driving them there.

Sure, its just like razorblades in the candy and roaming sex traffickers and all that stuff.

I didn't say they stopped swimming, but it just added some bullshit on top that I would have rather done without.

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