Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from June, 2014

Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy

The pic below is a representation of how when the years in which the same team won the FIFA World Cup are added up, you get 3,964. Coincidence... or more? When you look at the pic above, you feel like there are too many coincidences in this phenomenon to make it just a.. well.. coincidence. There has to be some magical, mythical and maybe supernatural force at play to ensure that such unbelievable phenomenon occurs. It is natural, something psychologists call ‘Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy’. The theory goes that when you shoot the side of a barn (house, barn, whatever), randomly, it is probable that at one particular place, there are a lot of bullet holes. This happened completely by chance, not due to design. But now, if I were to draw a bull’s eye over the place where the bullet holes and hide all the other bullet holes, you might think that whoever did the shooting was a pretty good shot (a sharpshooter). What happened in truth, though, is that I have highlighted