In the early 2000s, Cameron Moll was working on a presentation about problem solving and wanted to visualize Abraham Wald‘s work in World War II studying the bullet holes in aircraft returning from action. So, he took a diagram of an airplane and drew red dots on it to represent the damage that was visible on surviving aircraft. That became the de-facto illustration for survivorship bias.

I think the most fascinating part of this story is that Wald’s original report from 1943 was un-illustrated. I had always assumed that the diagram was from the original work, and not something that came 60 years later.