The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is a logical fallacy in which someone stresses the similarities in a data set while downplaying or ignoring the differences.
The name of this fallacy comes from a story about a Texan who shoots holes in the side of a barn. Then, after shooting, he draws a circle around the tightest cluster of bullet holes and declares that to be his target, then proudly gives himself the title of “sharpshooter”. While the sharpshooting Texan is usually seen as a joke, many people apply that very same logic to real-world scenarios.
A common example is when people make “prophecies” about the future. The fortune teller will make vague statements about what is to come, then when that point in the future arrives, they “clarify” their statements to fit what happened. Sometimes, the point in time itself is not even clear, with the predicted events just being said to happen at some unspecified point in the future. The problem with this methodology is that if you make enough vague predictions of events that will occur at some undefined point in the future, then eventually, out of pure chance alone, there will be some event that resembles the predicted event, and the fortune teller can point to that as “proof” of their predictions.
The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is the product of a psychological phenomenon called apophenia. Apophenia…
