The Texas Sharpshooter can make his appearance in a more nefarious way, though. The Texas Sharpshooter doesn’t require ill intent on the part of the party committing it (although that can happen) it just requires the human tendency to see patterns in randomness. But it’s easy to see from this how even well-meaning professionals can fall prey to this one, and why replication is important for scientific and medical studies. Other studies failed to replicate the study's results. In looking at data for over 800 different ailments, there was a high probability there would be a random cluster effect for at least one of those ailments. Sounds pretty definitive, but… it was later found that this was an example of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. The researchers then looked for increases in rates of over 800 different ailments among that population, and found that childhood leukemia was four times more prevalent among those surveyed than among those that did not live near power lines. Researchers surveyed populations living within 300 meters of power lines over a 25 year period. But because apparent clusters can also occur randomly, researchers have to be cautious and not make assumptions about causation.Īnother more specific example of this is a 1992 Swedish study on the health effects of living near power lines.
Some cancer clusters are, indeed, caused by something (see: Love Canal). The human tendency is to see patterns, but sometimes things are truly random. When looking at cancer data (or any similar such medical data), researchers have to be careful NOT to overinterpret it. And sometimes a cluster, or apparent cluster, in a sample of data is just a random occurrence. Let’s look at another real-life example: cancer clusters. “Hister,” (which some people interpret as being Nostradamus coming very close to predicting the name “Hitler”) by the way is actually the Latin name for the Danube River (probably stemming from a tribe called the Histri that lived along the lower Danube in ancient times). The issue is that Nostradamus wrote over 900 such quatrains, and they are of course vague, leaving it easy for someone browsing them to cherry-pick and find ones with certain phrasing and interpret them how they like. This has been interpreted as a prediction of the rise of Hitler, proving Nostradamus’ psychic abilities of prediction. He will cause great men to be dragged in a cage of iron, When the son of Germany obeys no law.”
“Beasts wild with hunger will cross the rivers, The greater part of the battle will be against Hister. This fallacy can be related to the Gamblers Fallacy or to what is called the Clustering Illusion - the human tendency to see patterns, clusters or streaks in small data samples where there are none.
Think of it as overemphasizing similarities while minimizing differences in data to arrive at a (possibly desired) conclusion - which leads to a false conclusion. The Texas Sharpshooter is an informal fallacy where unwarranted meaning is assigned to randomness, or information supporting an argument is cherry-picked while information that does not is ignored. Or, imagine a marksman shooting the side of a barn, then painting bullseyes around each one, making it seem as if he is a top marksman. To get an idea of this one, take a look at the illustration above.
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