It gives a person a clear, objective picture of their reality. It illustrates how people look for similarities, ignoring differences, and do not account for randomness.ĭata is a wonderful thing. The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy is a logical fallacy based on the metaphor of a gunman shooting the side of a barn, then drawing targets around the bullet hole clusters to make it look like he hit the target. When reviewing your data, don’t fall victim to the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. The benefit or danger of a tool comes from the person wielding it. Like a shovel, it can dig a hole or it can kill zombies. The Manager says to the accountant, “What’s 2+2?” The accountant replies, “what do you want it to be?”ĭata is a tool.

↑ 'FRONTLINE: previous reports: transcripts: currents of fear'.

Texas sharpshooter fallacy.this article demonstrates how post hoc target shifting occurs and how it can distort the frequency and likelihood ratio statistics used to characterize DNA matches, making matches appear more probative than they actually are.

'Painting the target around the matching profile: the Texas sharpshooter fallacy in forensic DNA interpretation'. The term refers to the story of the Texan who shoots holes in the side of a barn and then draws a bull's-eye around the bullet holes The Skeptic's Dictionary: a collection of strange beliefs, amusing deceptions, and dangerous delusions. ↑ Bennett, Bo, 'Texas sharpshooter fallacy', Logically Fallacious, retrieved October 2014, description: ignoring the difference while focusing on the similarities, thus coming to an inaccurate conclusion Check date values in: |accessdate= ( help) CS1 maint: ref=harv ( link).Moving the goalpost, a related fallacy used to obtain the opposite conclusion.Nostradamus' quatrains are often liberally translated from the original (archaic) French, stripped of their historical context, and then applied to support the conclusion that Nostradamus predicted a given modern-day event, after the event actually occurred. This fallacy is often found in modern-day interpretations of the quatrains of Nostradamus.Subsequent studies failed to show any links between power lines and childhood leukemia, neither in causation nor even in correlation. over 800, was so large that it created a high probability that at least one ailment would exhibit the appearance of a statistically significant difference by chance alone. The problem with the conclusion, however, was that the number of potential ailments, i.e. The study found that the incidence of childhood leukemia was four times higher among those that lived closest to the power lines, and it spurred calls to action by the Swedish government. The researchers surveyed everyone living within 300 meters of high-voltage power lines over a 25-year period and looked for statistically significant increases in rates of over 800 ailments. A Swedish study in 1992 tried to determine whether or not power lines caused some kind of poor health effects.(See hypothesis testing.) What one cannot do is use the same information to construct and test the same hypothesis (see hypotheses suggested by the data) - to do so would be to commit the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. Alternatively, if additional information can be generated using the same process as the original information, one can use the original information to construct a hypothesis, and then test the hypothesis on the new data. One could then use the information to give support or cast doubt on the presence of that mechanism. For example one might, prior to examining the information, have in mind a specific physical mechanism implying the particular relationship. Thus, it typically does not apply if one had an ex ante, or prior, expectation of the particular relationship in question before examining the data. The fallacy is characterized by a lack of a specific hypothesis prior to the gathering of data, or the formulation of a hypothesis only after data have already been gathered and examined. If the person attempts to account for the likelihood of finding some subset in the large data with some common property by a factor other than its actual cause, then that person is likely committing a Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

Some factor other than the one attributed may give all the elements in that subset some kind of common property (or pair of common properties, when arguing for correlation). The Texas sharpshooter fallacy often arises when a person has a large amount of data at their disposal, but only focuses on a small subset of that data.

Sharpshooter fallacy