Are your gut bacteria asking for Vaseline?

This post is remarkable, isn't it? 

 
Can you guess which bias - a bias in each one of us (which we may not want to admit) - gets triggered by posts such as these?

Some options for you to pick from:
- The Confirmation Bias
- The Sunk Cost Bias
- The Survivorship Bias
- The Halo Effect
- The Conformity Bias
- None of the above (now I sound like an exam paper, albeit one that hasn't leaked out) 
If none of the above, then what is it?

Happy Tuesday and keep that frown upside down 🙂
Scroll down for the answer......…

No, some more down.......

Yuppp, some more down.......

Well, it is the Survivorship bias that might be triggered by posts like these: someone lived to be 96, after eating vaseline every day, so.....
...so should I do that too?

It's a false correlation, of course.  If it were true and endorsed by medical science, all of us would have vaseline stocked in the kitchen, alongside Chawanprash.  

Ok, so what if - just if - there is a correlation?

Nope, even if there were to be correlation, it does not mean causation - that one causes the other: One person has vaseline, lives long, does not mean it's the mandatory dietary reco for a long life.  He could have lived long because he brushed his teeth with pumpkin paste or walked on walnuts or (as is more likely) had a good set of genes (moral: choose your parents wisely).

Back to Survivorship Bias:  
Have you been getting carried away by it and justifying it to yourself (and others)?  Learning more about this can save you a lot of money (and time and other equally useful stuff).  

Lives too, as Abraham Wald will tell you.

To learn more about survivorship bias, here's the place to go to:
https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/survivorship-bias
And don't miss the story of Abraham Wald in this article, if you haven't heard it before - it's just brilliant!