This is an interesting history post about survivorship bias, which is a logic error where you focus on things that survived when you should really be looking at things that didn’t. This can lead to incorrect conclusions because of incomplete data. It starts with talking about allergies and then uses the example of World War II planes that survived combat:
Leading to the logical conclusion that rates for mental illness, autism, rape, allergies &c could be their lowest in history but we don’t know because we don’t have reliable historical data.
EXACTLY THANK YOU
People are going, “Well, I got (measles, mumps, rubella, etc.) AND I’M FINE!” Yes, you’re fine, but the people who were not fine aren’t here to tell us about it.
“I rode around in the back of a pickup truck all the time when I was a kid, and I didn’t die!” Yes, and the people who died aren’t here to tell us they did.
I am an amateur genealogist and was talking with my Aunt about having found out something interesting about my Great Aunt who was still alive until my early 30s. I had found a census that listed her 3 children but in the next census there were only 2. So I had asked my Aunt if she knew what had happened to the daughter. She got upset and said Rosie didn’t have a daughter. I sent her a picture of the census and pointed out that she was listed as a daughter. I could find no other information on her and suggested that a childhood illness took her and that Aunt Rosie had found it too painful to mention her.