Abraham Wald and the airplane diagram with red bullet holes(cameronmoll.com)
cameronmoll.com
Abraham Wald and the airplane diagram with red bullet holes
https://www.cameronmoll.com/journal/abraham-wald-red-bullet-holes-origin-story
4 comments
I second the that talk. A great look into a slice of history I only knew the vague outline of previously.
You may enjoy "Between Human and Machine Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics" by David A. Mindell.
I want to be clear, up front, that I believe credit should go where credit is due but, ignoring the arrogance of the blog post in its entirety, there are two closely-related things that rub me the wrong way about this. First is the fact that the actual famous image (which is both the image the author uses at the top of their blog post as well as the one found on wikipedia — who, ironically, _do_ indeed give them credit) is not the image this person created. Second is the fact that the author did not even create the original image. As mentioned in the blog post, the original was created by Abraham Wald. So, this person is neither the creator of the original image, nor the creator of the famous image. They simply feel like they haven't gotten enough credit for making it famous.
No, Abraham Wald didn't create any image. He created the report that those images were inspired by. The blog post's author created the image that's lower down in the page and links to the original report that you can page through. If you do, you will see there are no such images.
FWIW, I've never seen either image until today, but am familiar with this example (Abraham Wald's WWII plane research) being used when talking about survivorship bias.
FWIW, I've never seen either image until today, but am familiar with this example (Abraham Wald's WWII plane research) being used when talking about survivorship bias.
Is there some value here, in clarifying the record about provenance of an illustration that's been circulating for a very neat idea? (If it hadn't already been clarified elsewhere.)
Having read this comment before reading the article itself, I expected it to be a lot more bitter. But it wasn't, it was just "hey this is how it happened".
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But from https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ I learned that what really helped the planes most was not better armor, it was radar countermeasures that kept the Luftwaffe from being able to target the bomber stream. If you have an hour, I highly recommend that talk. And the blog series that goes with it is brilliant.