A major problem with historiography – our interpretation of the past – is that history is famously written by the victors. We do not see what Nassim Taleb calls the “silent grave” – the lottery ticket holders who did not win. Thus, we over-attribute success to things done by the successful agent rather than to randomness or luck, and we often learn false lessons by exclusively studying victors without seeing all of the accompanying losers who acted in the same way but were not lucky enough to succeed.
An often-cited example was the work done during World War II on improving bomber losses due to enemy fire. When bombers were returning from missions with heavy damage, say in their tail section, engineers were looking at this and suggesting that the tail needed to be reinforced. However, this analysis did not include the planes that had been shot down, which means that it could have been a potential weakness in say, the wings, that was causing the losses, and the tails were already strong enough. The engineers could only see the surviving aircraft and this biased their thinking.
An interesting viewpoint on Surviorship Bias from Shane Parrish https://fs.blog/2020/10/sharks-survivorship-bias/