Beating Bias to Win Wars

Survivorship Bias, WWII stories, Creating Ben & Jerry’s and what the Covid Crisis means for Capitalism, Globalization and Humanity.

A few months ago, I was visiting a friend at Columbia University, climbing Morningside Drive on another freezing day in New York. Little did I know, that 75 years prior, this same area was deeply involved in the US war effort in Europe and the Pacific. Indeed, walking the same streets from July 1942 to September 1945, were “the most extraordinary group of statisticians ever organized, taking into account both number and quality”, the Statistical Research Group (SRG).

This was not your average research or consulting group. To start with, it handled pretty serious matters. As the group’s Direct of Research, Allen Wallis, later recounted:

The first project assigned to the SRG was to evaluate the comparative effectiveness of four 20 millimeter guns on the one hand and eight 50 caliber guns on the other as the armament of a fighter aircraft. This assignment had been preceded by two months of study of air warfare analysis and plane-to-plane fire control. This first assignment involved a study of the geometry and tactics of aerial combat, the probability of hitting, and the vulnerability of aircraft.