Remember, history is written by the survivors

We are urged to learn from history. But what if the history is biased? Here’s a case showing how slanted history can lead to bad decisions. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, U.S. advisors were mislead by the fallacy of silent evidence, that is, not seeing the full story when looking at history, just seeing the rosier parts of the process reported by the “winners.” U.S. policy was tragically misguided because of survivorship bias, that is, concentrating on and giving undue credit to the people, things or interpretations that "survived" the process and inadvertently overlooking those that didn't because of their invisibility.