Why can't we 'invert' it, just because it's statistical effect? Yes, in your formulation, some of the new things in the pool will go on to live a long time, while others will be selected out.
But so what? We are talking about the expected lifetime of an item in the pool, conditioned only on it's age. There's no fundamental problem making a statement that this expected lifetime is short for new things, even if some fraction of those new things will last a long time, right?
After all, we don't know any one individual item that's been around a long time will last a lot longer. We only know we expect it to. Because even long lived items have finite lifetime, hence they'll eventually die (and when they do it'll be really surprising, because they've been around so long; but it will happen eventually.)
And so the statement is always talking about expected lifetime, whether for items that have already lasted a long or short time.
(Hence I still don't think there's really any logical 'inversion' here.)