I guess this seems to be the current trend in clickbait?
Over the last couple months, I've seen an increasing number of headlines and YouTube videos scroll past that were of similar shapes ("Everything you know/knew/were told/people say about X is wrong", "Why is everybody complaining/so obsessed/claiming Y/... about X?") and every single time it's the first time I hear about X or it's asserted property.
The idea behind it is probably that you feel behind the curve because "everybody" is talking about X and you haven't even heard about it. So you click the link (or on Youtube: the angry-shouty-guys face) to learn about X. Enough people do it, and suddenly, everybody on social media is talking about X, or correcting each other that X actually isn't Y.
I didn't know it as a visual meme, more of an adage: don't reinforce your bombers where the ones that came back got hit. In other words, be aware of accidental bias on sampling, which could be so severe that it results in choices that are exactly wrong.
It comes with an anecdote, apparently, about a wartime mathematician named Abraham Wald, in which officers have the dumb idea of looking where the bullet holes are and Wald tells them they're wrong and "Wald’s recommendations were quickly put into effect", and this totally happened. But the blog tells us this never happened, and the armor was in the right place already.
So, I don't know, continue to be aware of accidental bias on sampling, except if you travel back in time to 1942 and you're put in charge of aircraft armor you shouldn't worry so much because you're basically doing the right thing. Yes. Also, people like exaggerating stories.
Hi. I believe the plane adage can open minds. ALSO I believe the "correct" reasoning that commonly happens in the plane adage logically non-valid. This could be demonstrated syllogistically, but it is simpler to note that if the enemy only shoots your planes in places that are "good hits" (easy to hit and likely to make your planes fall), then the situation would look same to you. The actual correct choice generally is to gain as many bits of useful information as fast as possible.
This creates a paradox, because now the only thing you've been told about the Chickenpox bomber is that everything you know about them is wrong... but that was wrong because you hadn't previously been told anything, but now you have, and it is wrong... but that would make it right... etc.
Ah, the curse of knowledge. The author is clearly very experienced in his domain, so when a daft-but-useful meme happened to stray across into an area he knows about he felt empowered to refute it. The problem is that the meme, like most memes, is a wildly simplified abstraction for something else, not really a story about planes, and the story at its heart is more like a parable than a factual statement. Everyone who hears about the plane and the dots and the armour eventually understands it's about looking at a piece of evidence and realizing you need to look at the whole picture instead of what's immediately apparent (eg "planes that get shot" versus "planes that get shot and survive").
The author knows more about plane survivability than most, but couldn't see past the facts to understand the meaning.
The word you're looking for is "fiction", and the moral of a story isn't diminished simply because the story is fictional. Parables, allegories, fables, myths, and fairy tales often contain truth despite not having actually happened. The opposite happens too, where the occasional real life anecdote is believed to contain some general truth despite being a one-off occurrence.
When I heard the story, it was represented as a real life experience, not a fable, not fiction.
Since you're going there, there's a lot of people who claim to be Christian who would be kind of surprised if you said that it didn't matter if Jesus never existed. Same for Muslims with Muhammad, and Buddhist with Buddha.
There’s a certain type of person who smugly debunks the factual elements in a fable from Aesop or a fairytale. I understand some people are rather literal, but…come on.
