Texas sharpshooter fallacy

What it is

Picks the hypothesis after looking at the data, like firing at a barn wall and then drawing the target around the bullet holes. Patterns found this way are not evidence.

Related

• Cherry picking fallacy
  Both choose the evidence to fit the conclusion; the sharpshooter does it by drawing the target after the shots.
• Apophenia bias
  Drawing the target around random hits is a form of apophenia: finding a pattern in noise.
• Clustering illusion bias
  The sharpshooter fallacy treats an accidental cluster as significant, which is the clustering illusion.

References

• Wikipedia: Texas sharpshooter fallacy en.wikipedia.org
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Fallacies iep.utm.edu
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Fallacies plato.stanford.edu
• Wikipedia: List of fallacies en.wikipedia.org
• Purdue OWL: Logical fallacies owl.purdue.edu

More in “Cause, statistics and evidence”