Hi folks! A little behind schedule this week again, but it’s time for another installment of Logical Fallacies Bootcamp, a series where I explain a common logical fallacy (formal or informal) and provide a few examples. Hopefully, this will help readers identify these when they find them “in the wild” and also help tighten up their own arguments by avoiding committing these.
Today’s installment: The Texas Sharpshooter.
To get an idea of this one, take a look at the illustration above. 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.
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. Think of it as overemphasizing similarities while minimizing differences in data to arrive at a (possibly desired) conclusion — which leads to a false conclusion.
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.
Let’s look at a few examples:
One of Nostradamus’ quatrains runs thus:
“Beasts wild with hunger will cross the rivers, The greater part of the battle will be against Hister. He will cause great men to be dragged in a cage of iron, When the son of Germany obeys no law.”
This has been interpreted as a prediction of the rise of Hitler, proving Nostradamus’ psychic abilities of prediction.
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. “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).
Let’s look at another real-life example: cancer clusters.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes a cluster, or apparent cluster, in a sample of data is just a random occurrence.
When looking at cancer data (or any similar such medical data), researchers have to be careful NOT to overinterpret it. The human tendency is to see patterns, but sometimes things are truly random. Some cancer clusters are, indeed, caused by something (see: Love Canal). But because apparent clusters can also occur randomly, researchers have to be cautious and not make assumptions about causation.
Another more specific example of this is a 1992 Swedish study on the health effects of living near power lines. Researchers surveyed populations living within 300 meters of power lines over a 25 year period. 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.
Sounds pretty definitive, but… it was later found that this was an example of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. 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. Other studies failed to replicate the study's results. 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. 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.
The Texas Sharpshooter can make his appearance in a more nefarious way, though. Certainly, parties can deliberately choose to select only that information that supports a desired conclusion while ignoring information that does not. I think anyone following the pandemic closely over the past couple of years has probably run into a few such folks who cling tightly to claims of ivermectin being a miracle treatment for COVID-19 while choosing to ignore any information to the contrary, or similar such behavior regarding the effectiveness or supposed dangers of the COVID vaccines.
As with so many fallacies, the best defense against this one is critical thinking and keeping your skeptical radar tuned. Sometimes it’s not obvious when this one is being committed, so it may take some research on your part to uncover the facts. And of course if you do have facts on hand to counter it, use it. If someone is committing this fallacy, point out the information they’ve ignored. They may or may not acknowledge it (see my reference above regarding the pandemic), but hey, at least you’ve tried, and anyone else within eye-or-earshot will get a more complete dose of information than they’d have gotten otherwise.
That’s all for tonight, folks, so I’ll leave you with a quote from a real-life sharpshooter (born in Ohio, though, not Texas).
Logical Fallacies Bootcamp:
The Strawman
The Slippery Slope
Begging the Question
Poisoning the Well
No True Scotsman!
Ad Hominem
False Dilemma
Non Sequitur
Red Herring
Gamblers Fallacy
Bandwagon Fallacy
Appeal to Fear
The Fallacy Fallacy
Appeal to Personal Incredulity
Appeal to Authority
Special Pleading
Cognitive Bias Bootcamp:
Bystander Effect
Curse of Knowledge
Barnum Effect
Declinism
In-Group Bias