- Clarity Drops
- Posts
- Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy & More
Reading time: 4 min
Today’s high-signal drops:
• Makes-You-Think Tweet: Doing hard things
• Mind-Expanding Concept: The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy
• Cool Quote or Question: Is this one of the necessary things?
• High-Signal Content: The nuclear family was a mistake
Makes-You-Think Tweet
Prove you can do hard things
When a teenager asks why they need to learn calculus, what should you say?
You know they will never use it in adulthood, outside of certain career choices.
You could say, “It’ll help you get into college,” but then they’re left wondering why… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
— Nat Eliason (@nateliason)
8:59 PM • Jul 10, 2023
Mind-Expanding Concept
The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy
by Drik-Jan Hoek
We cherry-pick data to fit our conclusions.
When stated like this, it's obvious that we shouldn't do it, but we often don't realize we're doing it. We plot incidences of cancer with dots on a map and we immediately start thinking why people are disproportionately getting cancer in your hometown of Detroit just by seeing clusters of dots around it. The thing is, in any collection of data, there will be clusters. They might not mean anything.
The fallacy is named after a cowboy who, after shooting at a barn, goes to paint a bull's eye on a cluster of bullet holes, to make it seem like he's a great shooter. Even though the shots were taken randomly, he makes it look like it was non-random. A role in the center of a bull's eye has significance.
At its core, our brains are meaning- and pattern-making machines. We identify patterns where none exist. Kahneman and Tversky on “Thinking Fast and Slow”:
“In World War II, Londoners took notice when bombing raids consistently missed certain neighborhoods. People began to believe German spies lived in the spared buildings. They didn’t. Analysis afterward by Kahneman and Tversky showed the bombing strike patterns were random.”
Sometimes what we see is all there is. And sometimes meaningful things happen by chance. When the same data is used to both create a hypothesis AND test it, there's fertile ground for this fallacy to occur.
Cool Quote or Question
Is this one of the necessary things?
High-Signal Content
“…families have also gotten a lot smaller. The general American birth rate is half of what it was in 1960. In 2012, most American family households had no children. There are more American homes with pets than with kids. In 1970, about 20 percent of households had five or more people. As of 2012, only 9.6 percent did. We’re likely living through the most rapid change in family structure in human history. The causes are economic, cultural, and institutional all at once.”
See you next week,
Filipe