Week 10 Autopsy: When the autopsy lies
Week 10 — auditing your own finished report for survivorship bias and cherry-picked evidence, after this week's lecture.
28 September 2026
Before the session#
Attend this week’s lecture on why we only ever study restaurants that failed and also left a trail — the ones that failed quietly, with no reviews and no coverage, are invisible to every method this course teaches, and that’s a bias built into the whole exercise, not just your specimen.
In the session#
You re-read your own submitted Autopsy Report specifically looking for places you picked the clip, quote or number that fit the story you’d already decided on, rather than the one that best represented the evidence. Desmond’s provocation: if you can’t find at least one, you weren’t looking hard enough.
Afterwards#
A short, honest addendum to your own thinking — not a resubmission, a record of what you’d check differently — that feeds directly into how you frame the verdict at the Coroner’s Inquest.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- one instance of survivorship or selection bias identified in your own report
- a stated correction or an explicit acknowledgement of the limitation
Teaching team
- Desmond Achebe — tutor