![]() ![]() For example when journalists find clusters of people having cancer they often quickly assume it has to be something in the environment like water or air pollution. You’ve probably seen many of these cases in the newspaper. So this is the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, also known as the clustering illusion. And even if it’s not, there can be many other reasons for it other than a bad neighborhood. But just as with the bullet holes on the barn, the clustering of houses for sale could also be a coincidence. The same thing happened to my friend: his brain saw the clustering of houses for sale, assumed a pattern and even conjured up a reason for it: namely that there would be something wrong with the street. But clusters naturally appear by chance and don't necessarily indicate that there is a causal relationship. This 'false cause' fallacy is coined after a marksman (who I assume was in or from Texas) shooting randomly at barns and then painting bullseye targets around the spot where the most bullet holes appear, making it appear as if he's a really good shot. This line of reasoning is known as the texas sharpshooter fallacy. The clustering of houses for sale could also just be a coincidence without a cause. But that doesn’t mean our brain is right. Our brain had a “better safe than sorry” strategy. This strategy made sense in a world where we lived in caves and didn’t have that much data. The human brain is basically a pattern recognition machine: even when we have deficient data, our brain tries to find patterns so it can make decisions on that. To to help my team understand and remember statistical constructs I've started telling them stories about statistics and the first one is about the Texas Sharshooter. ![]() However, what does come naturally and what is much easier for our brains to understand are stories. Statistics is not something that everyone is equally enthusiastic about and not somethign that comes naturally to us all. ![]()
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