Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic plays on the concept of fortune cookies and the TV show "Survivor." A woman asks a fortune teller how fortune telling works. The fortune teller explains that she tells clients vague things about themselves -- things like being against exercise or partying -- and that the ones who relate go home satisfied, thinking they've found "the real deal."

The woman asks, "You mean Survivor bias?" -- referring to survivorship bias, the logical error of focusing on people or things that passed a selection process while overlooking those that didn't. In this case, only the clients who feel the fortune was accurate come back, creating the illusion that the fortune teller is always right.

The fortune teller mishears this as a reference to the reality TV show "Survivor," and corrects: "I mean Cunningness" -- deflecting the statistical critique entirely. The humor lies in the double meaning of "survivor" and the fortune teller's cheerful obliviousness to the fact that the woman has just described exactly why fortune telling appears to work (survivorship bias) while the fortune teller interprets it as a compliment to her craftiness.