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.
