The Texas Sharpshooter

The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy The fallacy “Texas Sharpshooter” gets its name from imagining a cowboy shooting at a barn. Over time, one side of the barn that the cowboy continuously shoots at, becomes shattered with holes. In some places, there are many holes, in other places, there are few to none. If the cowboy later paints a bulls eye over a spot where his bullet holes clustered together, it would look like he’s pretty good with the gun. “The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is an informal fallacy in which pieces of information that have no relationship to one another are called out for their similarities, and that similarity is used for claiming the existence of a pattern.” The name comes from a joke about a Texan who fires some shots at the side of a barn, then paints a target centered on the biggest cluster of hits and claims to be a sharp shooter. The misconception of the Texas Sharpshooter is that you have to take randomness into account when determining cause and effect. The truth of the Texas Sharpshooter is that people will tend to ignore random chance when the results seem meaningful or when you want a random event to have a meaningful cause. One great example that I came across was the weird similarities to the presidents Lincoln and Kennedy. Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy were both presidents of the United States, elected 100 years apart. Both were shot and killed by assassins who were known by three names with 15 letters, John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, and neither killer would make it to trial. They were both killed on a Friday while sitting next to their wives, Lincoln in the Ford Theater, Kennedy in a Lincoln made by Ford. One example that I came up with was for example, say that I go on a date with a girl for the first time, knowing nothing about each other. After talking for awhile, we come to find out how much similarities we have. We come to find out that we drive the same kind of car, different color, but same year. We also come to