Survivorship bias
Etymology
A modern statistical term. "Survivor" carries its ordinary sense of "the one still standing"; "bias" comes, via Old French biais, from a word for "slant" or "oblique." The concept was sharpened in WWII, when analysts realized the returning planes showed where a bomber could be hit and still make it home — so armor belonged where the survivors were unscathed.
noun · /sur-VY-vur-ship BY-us/
Drawing conclusions only from the things that made it through, while the failures are invisible.
What it names
Why success advice is often misleading — you hear from the winners, never from the identical people who did the same things and failed.
Example
"All these founders dropped out of college" is survivorship bias; the dropouts who failed didn’t get interviewed.
Related idea
Selection bias is the general family; survivorship bias is the version where the missing cases are the ones that died off.