Rethinking and Survivorship Bias

I have been thinking a lot about this:

When I first read this http://youarenotsosmart.com/2013/05/23/survivorship-bias/ I was thinking “oh, I never thought about it that way, I need to redirect my brain”. Then I realized that no, this is how my husband and I see everything. (Caution, very long and wordy article. Good but wordy. The first half is more a history lesson, then a bit that is important to the article, and then the end comes back to that first half full circle. So iuf you are in a hurry skip down to the image of the bomber and read there.)

If it isn’t working for other people then we look for a different way to do things. Instead of looking at the few successes with any given thing (and boy do we hear about those- but it worked for so and so…so what, it didn’t work for 90% of the other people who tried it) we focus on why isn’t it working for all those other people, there has to be something better. Then we search until we find something that is working for us. Thus the radical unschooling, thus the home/unchurching, thus the natural remedies, the gentle parenting and so on. We tend to rethink everything. If it isn’t working then lets do something else- why continue doing something that is damaging us and our relationships even if it IS tradition or the way things have always been.

I remember a while back Jessica Bowman wrote a great post about not worrying about what they aren’t learning and repeated the “This is stupid, so I’m not doing it anymore.” Exactly. (http://www.christianunschooling.com/why-i-stopped-stressing-myself-out-with-classical-homeschooling/) If something isn’t helping us or our family, if it isn’t making our lives better or doing what it is supposed to be doing, then why are we still doing it. “This is stupid. I’m not doing it anymore.”