There are several logical fallacies that are analogous to the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. Such cognitive biases have manifested themselves in the form of poor decisions during sporting events, in the battlefield, and even during recreational activities such as gambling. The same gift can also create an undesirable bias in the human mind, resulting in a substantial impairment of its decision-making ability. This inclination can mostly be attributed to the propensity of the human brain for pattern-recognition a cognitive process that is crucial for identifying spatial relations, remembering findings, and detecting resources as well as hazards. We, as humans, are naturally inclined to carve order out of chaos, while conveniently disregarding or underpredicting variability in small samples of random data. The Texans subsequent claims of being a sublime sharpshooter. The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy derives its name from a joke about a Texan who fires a volley of gunshots at the side of a barn and then paints a target centered on the tightest cluster of hits. Back to: Management & Organizational Behavior How does the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy Work? In simpler terms, it is the human tendency to see or even look for patterns in outcomes that are completely random. The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, commonly known as a clustering illusion or the hot hand fallacy, refers to the human tendency to analyze outcomes consisting of clusters in a random sequence of events as non-random. Other Logical Fallacies What is the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy? It feels like this entire fallacy can be summarised as the statistical concepts: -Randomness is clumpy -correlation does not imply causation -data should not be cherry picked, and the fact that these are inherently difficult to understand concepts.Update Table of Contents What is the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy? How does the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy Work? The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy vs. The first episode is here.įUCKING ADVERTS ! JFC! Comment by Alex Bistagne This episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast is the fifth in a full season of episodes exploring logical fallacies. Listen as three experts in reasoning and logic explain why it is so easy to find what you are looking for when you go anomaly hunting in a large set of data. Since you are born looking for those spots where chance events have built up like sand into dunes, picking out clusters of coincidence is a predicable malfunction of a normal human mind, and it can easily lead to the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. Though some things in life seem too amazing to be coincidence, too odd to be random, too similar to be chance, given enough time (and enough events) randomness will begin to clump up in places. When you desire meaning, when you want things to line up, when looking for something specific, you tend to notice patterns everywhere, which leads you to ask the question, “What are the odds?” Usually, the odds are actually pretty good.įor instance: Does the Bermuda Triangle seem quite as mysterious once you know that just about any triangle of that size drawn over the globe just about anywhere planes and ships frequently travel will contain as many, if not more, missing planes and ships?ĭrawing circles (or triangles) around the spots where randomness clusters together seemingly chance events is called The Texas Sharpshooter fallacy, and it is one of the easiest mistakes to make when trying to understand big, complex sets of data.
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