He Praises Old Iron and Forgets Each Failed Repair
A man in Calumet pointed at his furnace in the basement and told me they do not make them like they used to. The furnace was forty-one years old. It still ran. It had three relatives in the neighborhood that had failed twenty years ago and been hauled to the scrap yard and forgotten. I want to talk about that today. About how the survivors lie to us about what kind of world made them. There is an old story about Abraham Wald in 1943. The Statistical Research Group at Columbia, working for the military, had been handed a problem. American bombers were coming back from missions over Europe full…
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