A useful way to think about this: market memory is biased because survivors do the storytelling. Three quick checks before you act: 1. Name the mechanism in plain English: The companies and strategies that persist are easier to study than the ones that quietly disappeared, yet the missing failures are often the more educational sample. 2. Say why it matters for behavior or portfolio decisions: That matters because survivorship bias makes many processes look cleaner than they were in real time. 3. Set the review question: A useful review question is which funding, incentive or cash-flow channel is actually doing the work. In practice: Reading only the winners of a theme can hide how much capital was lost on adjacent names that never made it through the cycle. Watch for: The mistake is mistaking the surviving map for the full terrain. That is usually where the edge is: not in the vocabulary, but in the structure underneath it.