In this case, the officers were making an assumption unwittingly: that the planes that came back were a random sample of all the planes. If that were true, you could draw conclusions about the distribution of bullet holes on all the planes by examining the distribution of bullet holes on only the surviving planes. Once you recognize that you’ve been making that hypothesis, it takes only a moment to realize it’s dead wrong; there’s no reason at all to expect the planes to have an equal likelihood of survival no matter where they get hit. In a piece of mathematical lingo we’ll come back to in
...more
