Comment by hprotagonist

I had a conversation with my advisor some years ago, who did his doctorate at MIT in the early 70s. I opined that MIT was now trading on their name harder, standards were slipping, people weren’t as hot shit now as they obviously were in his day.

“No, it’s just, it’s survivorship bias. There were plenty of people like that there then too; you just haven’t heard of them because they’ve done nothing with their lives since.”