Religion and survivorship bias

Biju Dominic of FinalMile Consulting has a piece in Mint about “what CEOs can learn from religion“. In that, he says,

Despite all the hype, the vast majority of these so-called highly successful, worthy of being emulated companies, do not survive even for few decades. On the other hand, religion, with all its inadequacies, continues to survive after thousands of years.

This is a fallacious comparison.

Firstly, comparing “religion” to a particular company isn’t dimensionally consistent. A better comparison would be to compare at the conceptual level – such as comparing “religion” to “joint stock company”. And like the former, the latter has done rather well for 300 years now, even if specific companies may fold up after a few years.

The other way to make an apples-to-apples comparison is to compare a particular company to a particular religion. And this is where survivorship bias comes in.

Most of the dominant religions of today are more than hundreds or thousands of years old. In the course of their journey to present-day strength, they have first established their own base and then fought off competition from other upstart religions.

In other words, when Dominic talks about “religion” he is only taking into account religions that have displayed memetic fitness over a really long period. What he fails to take account of are the thousands of startup religions that get started up once every few years and then fade into nothingness.

Historically, such religions haven’t been well documented, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. In contemporary times, one can only look at the thousands of “babas” with cults all around India – each is leading his/her own “startup religion”, and most of them are likely to sink without a trace.

Comparing the best in one class (religions that have survived and thrived over thousands of years) to the average of another class (the average corporation) just doesn’t make sense!

 

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