The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy
The Misconception: You take randomness into account when determining cause and effect.
The Truth: You tend to ignore random chance when the results seem meaningful or when you want a random event to have a meaningful cause.
Source: http://stanhamiltonartgallery.com
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.
Spooky, huh? It gets better.
Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy, and Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln.
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.
Both men were succeeded by a man named Johnson – Andrew for Lincoln and Lyndon for Kennedy. Andrew was born in 1808. Lyndon in 1908.
What are the odds?
In 1898, Morgan Robertson wrote a novel titled “Futility.”
Written 14 years before the Titanic sank, 11 years before construction on the vessel even began, the similarities between the book and the real event are eerie.
The novel describes a giant boat called the Titan which everyone considers unsinkable. It is the largest ever created, and inside it seems like a luxury hotel – just like the as yet unbuilt Titanic.
Titan had only 20 lifeboats, half than it needed should the great ship sink. The Titanic had 24, also half than it needed.
In the book, the Titan hits an iceberg in April 400 miles from Newfoundland. The Titanic, years later, would do the same in the same month in the same place.
The Titan sinks, and more than half of the passengers die, just as with the Titanic. The number of people on board who die in the book and the number in the future accident are nearly identical.
The similarities don’t stop there. The fictional Titan and the real Titanic both had three propellers and two masts. Both had a capacity of 3,000 people. Both hit the iceberg close to midnight.
Did Robertson have a premonition? I mean, what are the odds?
In the 1500s, Nostradamus wrote:
Bêtes farouches de faim fleuves tranner
Plus part du champ encore Hister sera,
En caige de fer le grand sera treisner,
Quand rien enfant de Germain observa.
This is often translated to:
Beasts wild with hunger will cross the rivers,
The greater part of the battle will be against Hister.
He will cause great men to be dragged in a cage of iron,
When the son of Germany obeys no law.
That’s rather creepy, considering this seems to describe a guy with a tiny mustache born about 400 years later. Here is another prophecy:
Out of the deepest part of the west of Europe,
From poor people a young child shall be born,
Who with his tongue shall seduce many people,
His fame shall increase in the Eastern Kingdom.
Wow. Hister certainly sounds like Hitler, and that second quatrain seems to drive it home. Actually, Many of Nostradamus’ predictions are about a guy from Germania who wages a great war and dies mysteriously.
What are the odds?
If any of this seems too amazing to be coincidence, too odd to be random, too similar to be chance, you are not so smart.
You see, in all three examples the barn was already peppered with holes. You just drew bullseyes around the spots where the holes clustered together.
Allow me to explain.
Say you go on a date, and the other person reveals they drive the same kind of car you do. It’s a different color, but the same model.
Well, that’s sort of neat, but nothing amazing.
Let’s say later on you learn their mom’s name is the same as your mom’s, and your mothers have the same birthday.
Hold on a second. That’s pretty cool. Maybe the hand of fate is pushing you toward the other person. Later still, you find out you both own the box set of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and you both grew up loving Rescue Rangers. You both love pizza, but hate rutabagas.
This is meant to be, you think. You are made for each other.
But, take a step back. Now, take another.
How many people in the world own that model of car? You are both about the same age, so your mothers are too, and their names were probably common in their time. Since you have similar backgrounds and grew up in the same decade, you probably share the same childhood TV shows. Everyone loves Monty Python. Everyone loves pizza. Many people hate rutabagas.
Looking at the factors from a distance, you can accept the reality of random chance.
When you desire meaning, when you want things to line up, you forget about stochasticity. You are lulled by the signal. You forget about noise. With meaning, you overlook randomness, but meaning is a human construction.
You have just committed the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.
The fallacy gets its name from imagining a cowboy shooting at a barn. Over time, the side of the barn becomes riddled with holes. In some places there are lots of them, in others there are few. If the cowboy later paints a bullseye over a spot where his bullet holes clustered together it looks like he is pretty good with a gun.
By painting a bullseye over a bullet hole the cowboy places artificial order over natural random chance.
If you have a human brain, you do this all of the time. Picking out clusters of coincidence is a predictable malfunction of normal human logic.
When you are dazzled by the idea of Nostradamus predicting Hitler, you ignore how he wrote almost 1,000 ambiguous predictions, and most of them make no sense at all. He seems even less interesting when you find out Hister is the Latin name for the Danube River.
When you marvel at the similarities between the Titan and the Titanic, you disregard that in the novel only 13 people survived, and the ship sank right away, and the Titan had made many voyages, and it had sails. In the novel, one of the survivors fought a polar bear before being rescued.
When you are befuddled by the Lincoln and Kennedy connections, you neglect to notice Kennedy was Catholic and Lincoln was born Baptist. Kennedy was killed with a rifle, Lincoln with a pistol. Kennedy was shot in Texas, Lincoln in Washington D.C. Kennedy had lustrous auburn hair, while Lincoln wore a haberdasher’s wet dream.
With all three examples there are thousands of differences, all of which you ignored, but when you draw the bullseye around the clusters, the similarities – whoa.
If hindsight bias and confirmation bias had a baby, it would be the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.
When reality shows are filmed, the producers have hundreds of hours of footage. When they condense that footage into an hour, they paint a bullseye around a cluster of holes. They find a narrative in all the mundane moments, extracting the good bits and tossing aside the rest. This means they can create any orderly story they wish from their reserves of chaos.
Was that one girl really a horrific bitch? Was that guy with the tattoos really that dumb? Unless you can pull back and see the entire barn, you’ll never know.
The reach of the fallacy is far greater than reality shows, presidential trivia and spooky coincidences. When you use the sharpshooter fallacy to determine cause from effect, it can harm people.
One of the reasons scientists form a hypothesis and then try to disprove it with new research is to avoid the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. Epidemiologists are especially wary of it as they study the factors which lead to the spread of disease.
If you look at a map of the United States with dots assigned to where cancer rates are highest, you will notice areas of clumping. It looks like you have a pretty good indication of where the groundwater must be poisoned, or high-voltage power lines are bombarding people with damaging energy fields, or where cell phone towers are frying people’s organs, or where nuclear bombs must have been tested.
A map like that is a lot like the side of the sharpshooter’s barn, and presuming there must be a cause for cancer clusters is the same as drawing bullseyes around them.
More often than not, cancer clusters have no scary environmental cause.
“A community that is afflicted with an unusual number of cancers quite naturally looks for a cause in the environment – in the ground, the water, the air. And the correlations are sometimes found: the cluster may arise after, say, contamination of the water supply by a possible carcinogen. The problem is that when scientists have tried to confirm such causes, they haven’t been able to. Raymond Richard Neutra, California’s chief environmental health investigator and an expert on cancer clusters, points out that among hundreds of exhaustive, published investigations of residential clusters in the United States, not one has convincingly identified an underlying environmental cause. Abroad, in only a handful of cases has a neighborhood cancer cluster been shown to arise from an environmental cause. And only one of these cases ended with the discovery of an unrecognized carcinogen.”
The Cancer Cluster Myth, The New Yorker, Feb. 1999
There are many agents at work. People who are related tend to live near each other. Old people tend to retire in the same areas. Eating, smoking and exercise habits tend to be similar region to region. And, after all, one in three people will develop cancer in their lifetime.
To accept something like residential cancer clusters are often just coincidence is deeply unsatisfying. The powerlessness, the feeling you are defenseless to the whims of chance, can be assuaged by singling out an antagonist. Sometimes you need a bad guy, and The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy is one way you can create one.
According to the Centers for Disease Control the number of autism cases among 8-year-olds increased 57 percent from 2002 to the 2006. Looking back over the last 20 years, the rates of autism have gone up 200 percent. Today, 1 in 70 male children has some form of autism spectrum disorder.
When those numbers were released, it seemed absolutely nuts. Parents around the world panicked. Something must be causing autism numbers to rise, right?
Early on, a bullseye was painted around vaccines because symptoms seemed to show up about the same time as kids were getting vaccinated. Once they had a target, a cluster, they failed to see all the other correlations. After years of research and millions of dollars, vaccines have been ruled out, but some parents and celebrities refuse to accept the findings. Singling out vaccines while ignoring the millions of other factors is the same as noting the Titan hit an iceberg but omitting it had sails.
Lucky streaks at the casino, hot hands in basketball, a tornado sparing a church – these are all examples of humans finding meaning after the fact, after the odds are tallied and the numbers have moved on. You are ignoring the times you lost, the times the ball missed the basket and all the homes the tornado blindly devoured.
In World War II, Londoners took notice when bombing raids consistently missed certain neighborhoods. People began to believe German spies lived in the spared buildings. They didn’t. Analysis afterward by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed the bombing strike patterns were random.
Anywhere people are searching for meaning, you will see the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. For many, the world loses luster when you accept the idea random mutations can lead to eyeballs or random burn patterns on toast can look like a person’s face.
If you were to shuffle a deck and draw out 10 cards, the chances of the sequence you drew coming up are in the trillions, no matter what they are. If you drew out an ordered suit, it would be astonishing, but the chances are the same as any other set of 10 cards. The meaning is a human construct.
Look outside. See that tree? The chances of it growing there on that spot, on this planet, circling this star in this galaxy among the billions of galaxies in the known universe are so incredibly small it seems to have meaning, but that meaning is only a figment of your imagination. You are drawing a bullseye around a cluster on a vast barn.
It is no less astronomical the odds of it being there than the patch of dirt beside it. The same is true if you looked out onto a desert and found a lizard, or into the sky and found a cloud, or into space and saw nothing but hydrogen atoms floating alone. There is a 100 percent chance something will be there, be anywhere, when you look, but only the need for meaning changes how you feel about what you see.
For as long as there been humans we have searched for our place in the cosmos. Where are we? Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a hum-drum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. This perspective is a courageous continuation of our penchant for constructing and testing mental models of the skies; the Sun as a red-hot stone, the stars as a celestial flame, the Galaxy as the backbone of night.
- Carl Sagan
To admit the messy slog of chaos, disorder and random chance rules your life, rules the universe itself, is a painful conceit. You commit the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy when you need a pattern to provide meaning, to console you, to lay blame.
You mow your lawn, arrange your silverware, comb your hair. Whenever possible, you oppose the forces of entropy and thwart their relentless derangement.
Your drive to do this is primal. You need order. Order makes it easier to be a person, to navigate this sloppy world.
Pattern recognition leads to food, protects you from harm. You are born looking for clusters where chance events have built up like sand into dunes. You are able to read these words because your ancestors recognized patterns and changed their behavior to better acquire food and avoiding becoming it.
Carl Sagan said in the vastness of space and the immensity of time it was a joy to share a planet and epoch with his wife. Even though he knew fate didn’t put them together, it didn’t take away the wonder he felt when he was with her.
You see patterns everywhere, but some of them are formed by chance and mean nothing. Against the noisy background of probability things are bound to line up from time to time for no reason at all. It’s just how the math works out. Recognizing this is an important part of ignoring coincidences when they don’t matter and realizing what has real meaning for you on this planet, in this epoch.
You Are Not So Smart – The Book
If you buy one book this year…well, I suppose you should get something you’ve had your eye on for a while. But, if you buy two or more books this year, might I recommend one of them be a celebration of self delusion? Give the gift of humility (to yourself or someone else you love). Watch the trailer.
Order now: Amazon - Barnes and Noble - iTunes - Books A Million
Links:
Kennedy and Lincoln Similarities
The Complete Text of “Futility”
The Global Consciousness Project
Cubik’s Rube on The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy
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#corrections
“It is no less astrononical…” should be “astronomical”. I noticed that there were five other blogs today that misspelled a word with the Greek prefix “astro”, meaning “star”. There are five days until the final flight of the Space Shuttle. Creeeeeeeeeeepy.
This is a good point. It is easy to see a pattern we are looking for.
But there is another side to this issue, and that is that randomness can’t actually exist.
The concept of randomness requires that there be situations in which two or more things could happen and one of them just happens to be the one which does. The classic example might be the roll of dice. But the outcome of a roll of dice can only be that which has to occur because of all the deciding factors involved in the dice and how it is rolled and onto what surface. If we knew everything about everything, everything would be predictable. Therefore there is no such thing as randomness. Belief in randomness is a bit like belief in the supernatural. It is belief that something can come in from some mysterious realm outside of the inter-connecting web of cause and effect which constitutes the universe.
Phenomena such as evolution are better understood not as a product of random chance (something which, even if it did exist, would, according to the laws of probability, be unlikely to lead to intelligent life), but rather as an unfolding of inherent potential in accordance with the limitations of the environment. Just as a seed, if planted in fertile soil with plenty of water, will grow into a tree, in those parts of the universe where conditions allow, energy will form matter, matter will become alive and living things will become intelligent.
Wow, I never saw it that way!
This is quite awesome, now I have even more substance to argue points on the discourse of evolution and other ‘random’ events :)
where can i read more about what you just wrote about?
Hello. :) What about the topic of the article? In your opinion , is the article about randomness or about creating a pattern where there isn’t one? I consider it to be the first , which would mean you’re starting a whole new point in a comment below something that has a completely different matter to review.
What I mean is , the person is trying to prove that stuff isn’t just happening , but instead people try and find “inner meaning” to help understand the world better. And just like you said “Belief in randomness is a bit like belief in the supernatural”. But again , that’s a completely different topic. To put it simply , the article is about the color – white and you just explained how much you know about the color – black.
Seems that Aussiescribbler is either poking fun at the fallacy in an ironical way, or else is a prime example of the fallacy itself! We can let the reader decide. HAH HAHA
Or is simply a brilliant responder….
“if we knew everything about everything, everything would be predictable.” look up quantum mechanics.. its kinda a problem for that idea.
Thanks a bunch. FIVE other blogs? This is also 9/11 – there is no way that is a coincidence.
Great essay! Is it just random chance that you posted it today, of all days?
(probably)
A nice essay for the “I believe everything happens for a reason crowd.” But just a quibble on the cancer cluster point. Oftentimes, the bull’s eye geography of a cluster IS statistically unlikely, it is merely the causation that is impossible to prove. With cancer causation probabilities typically measured in one-in-a-million ranges, counting statistics to develop higher confidence are just difficult with a couple dozen cancers. Besides, circumstantial evidence is still evidence. From a precautionary principle perspective, The cancer cluster down by the chemical plants and nowhere else is looks like a signal until somebody proves that it’s noise. I’m not so smart, but I’m still not living down there.
I liked all of the different examples that you left. A little bit of metaphysics, a little reality TV, a lot of bit of fun.
I love the article and the blog. We must have been fated to meet. Or are we just faded meat? I can’t remember.
if you go through life believing that than you are going to be a very pathetic human being.”coincidences” are what makes us releize that there is someone up there who cares about what happens to us down here. when times are hard think about those happenings and it will make it easier to bear.
Why do religous people always have to ruin a serious conversation by spouting on about an invisible man in the sky that looks after them? It’s childish, you need to build up your self esteem.
Amen to that.
Hahahah! Miss Anthropic is a very sad human being.
You have, ironically (and unintentionally) proved the thesis of the entire article. If that didn’t make sense, reread the damned thing before you troll.
Pretty big stretch of unrelated examples and EXCESSIVE paragraphs all to attach the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy to EVERYTHING that seems to have coincidence. Extremely unbalanced. Foolish
agreed.
He didn’t try and attach its importance to “everything”; he was just showing that the fallacy can have dangerous consequences in certain situations by giving some situations in which it does.
Thank you :)
not all sharp shooters are from Texas, some can truly shoot…
A successful man creates his own coincidences.
You make some good points here, but you stretch your case to meet your agenda.
I’m sure the people near the Gulf of Mexico will be glad to know that their respiratory problems since the oil gusher and millions of gallons of Corexit have no environmental connection. In fact, I’ll bet that there’s ‘scientific proof’ of that, generously financed by BP and Halliburton, proving that their sudden onset of symptoms has to do with depression, or genetics..
If you accept without question ‘scientific studies’ in the USA that absolve powerful players such as the electric industry, Big Pharma, BP et all, then You Are Not So Smart.
@opriehl – Oh no. Correlation often does mean causation, but not always. Asbestos, for example, or smoking cigarettes. I’m not saying a cluster of disease is NEVER the result of the environment, only that it often isn’t. Read the included links for more examples and caveats.
I like the point about entropy. There’s no escape from the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
The cancer cluster example is also interesting, and to me is very similar to the drawing of cards from a deck – for every cluster of people who develop cancers, there are dozens of clusters of people who *don’t* develop cancers! Should we then look at these anti-cancer clusters for some kind of preventative agent?
A cancer cluster scare of this type occurred recently in Australia. 16 women working in one particular government office, over the course of over a decade, developed breast cancer. Under public pressure an investigation was carried out. However not only was there no environmental cause found, but in fact the chance of the cancers occurring by chance was calculated to be about 1/25! So it was actually quite probable!
News article: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/10/26/2070775.htm
Investigative Report: http://www.abc.net.au/corp/pubs/documents/Breast_Cancer_Toowong_Final_Report.pdf
@scott – Wow. The office example is a great addition to this post. Thanks for sharing it.
@Miss Anthropic :
So you’re saying God caused the similarities between the Titanic sinking and the book that was written years before it? That sounds more like he’s screwing with us, rather than cares about us.
What’s pathetic is needing the comfort of assigning meaning to things that are random chance, instead of accepting things for what they are in reality. You shouldn’t have to lie to yourself just to make life bearable.
“Everyone loves Monty Python.”
Alas, no. If you’re on a date a she loves Monty Python . . . you are having a good day.
Awesome post. Just a wonderful description of a really hard-to-describe cognitive glitch.
A quote in your last post led me to “Judgment under uncertainty” which makes a fascinating counterpoint to “Blink.” Representativeness, it seems clear, is an incredibly powerful tool, so useful and so important that a large number of cognitive fallacies emerge from it*. The Texas sharpshooter fallacy seems like another example of this. So much of our day-to-day cognition depends or recognizing resemblance between one thing and another that we would appear to be primed to find similarity and search for a meaning in it.
*Thinking about it like any other biological strategy, like blood clotting, or childbirth, in which the positive utility of the strategy determines the number and the scale of the negative side-effects evolution will tolerate.
@Robert – Great comment. Yes, it seems pattern recognition fed by the pleasure and pain of dopamine neurons leads us to write narratives about all sorts of things.
A question about every example in here that really stands out to me, is not every event predictable by a series of cause and effect events that lead up to the event taking place. Meaning nothing in life is actually truly random? Not to say that there are not many people that make some pretty crazy connections when there clearly should be none, but for instance the shuffling the cards, technically if you knew which order the cards started in and then shuffled them and there was a machine that could measure how you shuffled them, then end state you could know the exact order of the cards as you flip them off the deck. It is a very impractical practice that is nearly impossible but yet in theory that makes nothing in life truly random but just a cause and effect scenario, that has too many causes to be able to calculate the effect. Even looking at the metaphor that this post is based on, “the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy” each bullet fired out of the gun has a specific predictable impact, based on the type of round, wind, temperature, etcetera. Now I agree with you in the fact that many individuals draw their own target around the impacts, but the impacts (or anything else that happens in life) are by no means random.
Well yes, up to a point, but surely it’s how predictable something is in practice which is important. There’s a limited set of things that I can measure, to a limited accuracy (and a far smaller set of things that I actually do measure). Then the range of outcomes that can occur given the data which I know is usually quite large.
Which out come that I’m going to actually get, where the bullet hits the barn so to speak, is to me essentially random.
you are just drawing a bullseye around this barn metaphor :P
@g50 – Ha. Yeah.
Kennedy didn’t have a secretary named Lincoln according to http://www.snopes.com/history/american/lincoln-kennedy.asp
So some “amazing coincidences” aren’t selection bias or some other buzzword so much as “made up.” Maybe you should do a post on how we believe things we read without assessing their credibility.
@Dan – Nice. Thanks for pointing that out. I think that would probably make a great future post, or part of one.
So good to know that there are other rational people on the planet.
Making things up and making things fit patterns is another thing that humans do and results in art and fiction which is another way to impose order on the universe. Fiction allows to have resolution, life usually doesn’t.
If the environmental factor is observed first, and the resultant problems show a testable connection to the environmental factor, it’s nothing like this fallacy. That’s what’s happening in the gulf. And guessing at an environmental factor isn’t the same as finding it. People who developed mesothelioma would show up in geographic clusters, but what they had in common was not a geographic factor, except for the asbestos factories where they or their family members worked.
And I *wish* everyone liked Monty Python. . .I wouldn’t have to explain so much!
I agree with this totally, I also don’t buy that “everything happens for a reason” crap. Yet somehow I met a girl that has the same likes/dislikes as me. Yes, I agree. Total randomness. Then lets add to that the fact that we were in a different country, in the same city, in the same cafe. Okay, so maybe somehow we decided to go to the same far far away place for vacation. While returning from our vacation(different airlines) we somehow met because both our planes had been grounded. Of course, if the weather sucks obviously both planes would have been grounded. Later that day both our luggages went missing and after that we both got our luggage back at the same time. Nevertheless, I do not buy it. Then a month later we both lost our jobs due to cut-backs. Our birthday is also on the same day. We both, had of course noticed this and decided to pick a random date and write it on a piece of paper. Guess what, the date was 25. August, for both of us. The similarities are endless. Yet, I still don’t believe in faith. Why you may ask? Well, cause I’m smart enough.
The comments are almost as good as the post itself.
I always learn something when I come here. I especially like the line, “If hindsight bias and confirmation bias had a baby, it would be the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.”
Personally, the knowledge that greater things are random and mostly out of my control is refreshing, humbling, and rewarding.
Out of all the randomness, out of all the possibilities – it makes me grateful to be as fortunate as I have been. To know that while chaos is spinning wildly around me, I have managed to establish myself as I am today, to simply be alive today – I have been lucky enough to stumble in to the good graces of some fine people, whom I may admire and love not because of “fate”, but simply because we understand one another and enjoy the time we have been allowed to spend together.
Think about it.
This has however made me increasingly aware of my disposition, as many of your articles do, so I must endeavor to improve myself – thank you for yet another outstanding article, David.
For the sake of argument I would like to state that using the logic in this article, it can be determined that the explanation given on the patterns analyzed is nothing more than someone drawing a bullseye around the bullet holes. This explanation of needing order to bring meaning to life is just that, a way for the person to bring meaning and order to their lives.
Just an opinion on the subject, mainly because I love Chaos and I love randomness. I love Anarchic situations. I find them interesting and entertaining. As an observer it is interesting to see people panic and try to figure out what is going on.
Actually, there is no fate or luck. Things do happen for a reason, although they’re usually trivial and never supernatural.
If someone mentions a joke to me, and I hear it in on TV later in the day, there is a connection(albeit an unimportant one). There are events that led this person to tell me the joke, events that led the TV channel to mention the joke and events I was involved in that allowed the two incidents to be connected.
In anon’s example, there are a countless number of events that led up to his and his (at the time future) girlfriend’s initial meeting in that cafe. You can trace this back as far as possible, to how all of their ancestors came to create them and how each of the actions in their lives led them to that place at that time. It was not meant to be, but it was also not random. The events of the present are the result of the past.
We also have to be careful not to go the other. A hell of a lot of things that appear random are in fact not. Almost any complex system is subject to chaos theory, which means there is meaning in the data.
@Rainsborough – True.
Great article – I love this site. Forgive me for being slightly pretty, but I’m just wondering why you call it the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy instead of just The Sharpshooter Fallacy.
@Kelley – That’s the name it is best known by. I suppose Texas is forever linked to gunslingers.
What i wondered about is why it’s called the “Sharpshooter” Fallacy?
As explained above, the person is shooting at a barn, not a hard to hit target, even from the outside.
Then it is said: “Over time, the side of the barn becomes riddled with holes”.
Seems like a “sharpshooter” would have a very tight hole grouping, not just holes all over the place.
The title does make for a more memorable mental picture. I simply dislike misuse of words.
Sharpshooter is not misused, it is intentionally used to describe the resemblance to the work of a sharpshooter that the random pattern of holes takes after meaning is assigned ex post facto via the bullseyes. The shooter makes a sharpshooter of himself after the fact.
Bleh, meant to say petty, not pretty. Sorry, I don’t pay close enough attention to my phone’s auto-correct thing sometimes.
It’s true with complex situations many people (especially those with an ax to grind) will just look at connected results. But to say life has no meaning means that you must be able to completely step back and look at the whole barn. Life, the universe and everything is too complex for you to cram it into a single metaphor.
People have been trying to understand life forever and it’s just not humanly possible yet. So while your other examples were great, your conclusion that life is just chaos is not supported.
@Mene Tekel – Good point. We can’t see the whole barn – that’s a great philosophy.
@Mene Tekel great point! It’s actually what was missing in the post.
And it is a really good post. By the way I love this blog.
I think it’s just as bad to dismiss as coincidence that which has the potential for meaning. To see coincidence everywhere is in itself a pattern. It’s as bad as starting an argument with “obviously”. I indeed think we’re biased to believe, prima facie, either one or the other (leaving aside any initial instinct). You are not so smart, I think, if you don’t question yourself on the issues that are important to you.
I strongly recommend the philosopher Bertrand Russell. He’s the one who said: “In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”
Another interesting thing. Stalin commited no less crimes against humanity than Hitler did. This is a fact that often remains unnoticed (becouse it is uneasy to admit that one criminal had ben left unpunished). It looks that prophets have been forecasting the names of the newspaper articles, not the actual future after all.
Clearly, this article is random Brownian motion of copper atoms and not a communicative effort on the the part of the writer. I still enjoyed your (?) random electrons that fell together into what I will call an article, although that is a fallacy on my part, I’m sure.
Always helpful to be reminded how not smart I am, humility facilitates an open mind.
Really good article, but I have a thought that its too tidy an explanation.
Yes, people do make patterns where there are none, but its too easy to use this explanation to dismiss everything that is otherwise unexplained coincidence – you can only do that if you know everything – and that, we don’t!
As an earlier commenter said, this is also a Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy!
I thought this post was well thought out and had much to say. The part that I find missing is that our minds are designed to predict, to make patterns out of chaos, and to find meaning in seemingly random events. That is how we navigate our world and find our way predictably back to where we wanted to go. When is a doorknob not a doorknob or a stoplight not a signal to let us know when to stop or go? The thing is not that we paint bulls-eyes around unknown events, but that we are certain of our conclusions. Anyone paying attention will notice that predictions have a definite failure rate so there should be a bulls-eye drawn around the area next to the barn as well (or some completely different design) and then there should be some process of comparison to see which one fits the data best as one gets closer to the scene. A truly observant detective may notice that the shots seem to have been merely aimed at the barn but be able to tell whether the shooter was right or left handed etc.
Pretty big stretch of unrelated examples and EXCESSIVE paragraphs all to attach the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy to EVERYTHING that seems to have coincidence. Extremely unbalanced. Foolish.
Ohh wait, someone said this in a previous comment, guess is a pattern which makes it true ?
The fallacy does not apply if one had an ex ante, or prior, expectation of the particular relationship in question before examining the data. For example one might, prior to examining the information, have in mind a specific physical mechanism implying the particular relationship.
Random? Yes, definitely. Meaningless? Perhaps not the best choice of words. A coincidence can still be meaningful — my father’s cancer was the result of random errors in cell division* (though certainly his heavy smoking shifted the odds around), but that doesn’t mean it, or his ensuing death, had any less meaning for me. Likewise, at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, meeting my fiancee. Totally chance encounter, a gamble for us both that paid off beyond our wildest hopes. But still extremely meaningful and important.
Perhaps you can make a later post on the way people confuse “meaningful” (which is in the eye of the beholder) and “purposeful” (which is in the intent of the causal agent, and requires that there *be* an agent causing the event).
*I think that’s how cancer works? I’m very, very much a layman when it comes to medicine.
The argument that correlations (“titan/titanic”) should be discarded simply because there also are non-correlating facts (“sail/engine”) does to me not seem sound in itself. It would allow to discard almost all correlations simply because there are also outliers.
Superbly written.
Yeah, I’m with Ben: we can’t fault our brains for doing what they are supposed to do. Making connections, seeing patterns where there seems to be none, predicting the future based on the past and even making assumptions is what we do better than any other form of life and makes being human so unique. Where it gets stupid (or not so smart) is when we conclude that our probabilities are certainties. The bulls-eye is but one possibility, something no other creature would see, but not the only possibility. One pattern we sometimes miss is the pattern of error in our guesses: we probably are wrong much more than we think, but we wouldn’t be able to navigate space and time so much better than any other life form if we weren’t right (or close enough) most of the time.
This is absolutely enlightening. I’ve never considered random occurrences in such a way. Thanks!
You lost me at the cancer clusters.
Great Article!
Anyone who wants a longer read about this subject should check out Leonard Mlodinow’s book “The Drunkard’s Walk”. More people need to know about these biases.
Great article as usual. The Autism rates example isn’t quite right though – they’re not rising just out of statistical noise; the diagnostic criteria for autism has become a lot more open and hence more people are flagged as autistic who may have just been considered odd-balls in the past. Still doesn’t mean you shouldn’t vaccinate your kids though!
I agree with this theory. But just wanted to share this with you :
I don’t hold any opinion about Nostradamus, nor do I care that much if he was poet or a wizard but one thing struck my memory when reading this article.
My father once found an old book from the library. A Finnish study made by a Finnish historian/literature professor (if I remember correctly – couldn’t find his name with google, sorry) in 1942. This was before the WW2 ended. In that book the ‘professor’ had studied possible views for the future by interpreting Nostradamus’ poetry. It was amazing to read what conclusions he ended up with. Of course he interpretted from Nostradamus that the WW2 was ending soon & how it would end (no big task though) but the most interesting aspects were his own comments of wondering how such a huge and powerful country as Soviet Union back then could collapse in the future – in 1990′s. He was also interpreting correctly about the technological success of the 80′s-2000 etc.
Would be interesting to discuss is this kind of “foretelling where the bullet holes would appear” or is it just pattern-finding in a kind of reversed – expecting order.
:)
“Yeah, I’m with Ben: we can’t fault our brains for doing what they are supposed to do. ”
I don’t think it’s about finding fault, just about recognizing ways we commonly err. I thought “Sources of Power” was a great book on how a representative strategy — what Klein calls recognition-primed decision making, or RPD — works exceptionally well in many contexts. Taken together with critiques like this one, I think you start to get a feel for the strengths and weaknesses of how people make decisions.
“I don’t think it’s about finding fault, just about recognizing ways we commonly err.”
I agree, and there is much to be gained by improving our thinking through discrimination. However the idea was presented as fairly one sided and I felt a better perspective was missing. The point is that the error is not in drawing bulls-eyes, it is in concluding that that is the way it happened. Only great intelligence would notice the possibility of a bulls-eye. Most data is in clusters and most clusters have a cause because the world is the result of cause and effect. Where we are most weak in our thinking is in guessing at the cause, not in assuming there is one. As Oscar Wilde once said “Only shallow people do not judge by appearances”.
“The argument that correlations (“titan/titanic”) should be discarded simply because there also are non-correlating facts (“sail/engine”) does to me not seem sound in itself. It would allow to discard almost all correlations simply because there are also outliers.”
That is precisely correct, and it *is* sound. All correlations should be disregarded when used just to show how spookily similar two events are because there are billions of events that are not spookily similar. One would need to make an argument that the number of spooky similarities as a whole should be more than expected in the universe of all events.
On the other hand, correlations that might show evidence of causation (such as cancer clusters) should not be “simply discarded” because the causation could be real. However, you should be careful not to let the possibility of causation allow you to find it where it isn’t.
“Most data is in clusters and most clusters have a cause because the world is the result of cause and effect.”
Nope. Look at different random series, such as years of lottery numbers, or long series of coin flips. You’ll see clusters. People somehow expect random distribution to mean even distribution. That’s the fallacy.
The fallacy described here does happen often. However, attributing meaning to seemingly random events are precisely what has brought the human race forwards. A random event becomes very predictable when you know the factors that led to it.
A coin flip has a 50% chance of a head or a tail right? Now, what if you knew the exact force with which it was flipped, its weight, size, and the density and turbulence of the air around it? Still random? Nope. You could pretty much predict the outcome with simple physical calculations.
A tree growing at a specific spot: are the chances of it astronomical? Maybe. But what if you knew that the soil there was fertile, there was an abundance of that kind of seed, and the sunlight was just right for it to grow? Still astronomical? Slightly more probable than before you knew all this definitely.
Now, apply the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy to itself: out of All the random events that have had meanings associated to them, how many are valid and how many are invalid? If you had a random event occur a 100 times in a row, there’s a strong reason to believe that there’s a scientific reason behind it: this is what Empirical analysis is all about. The only reason Lincoln-Kennedy and the Titan-Titanic incidents are random is because they each happened just Once!! There aren’t enough authors predicting ships sinking to conclude premonition is true! There aren’t enough presidential pairs assassinated on eerily similar dates to conclude there’s a pattern!
In short, associating meanings to what seems at first random coincidences is what has made us Smarter, not Stupider, simply because it’s helped us understand our world better. So even if it fails once in a while, don’t knock it: It’s more useful than one would think ;)
It might have been mentioned in other comments, but this is a similar phenomenon to all those images of Jesus on toast/inside an apple/on a dog’s backside etc.
Of course, If I had read your entire article I would have seen the toast thing.
Feeling pretty silly now…
Great Article. Please keep posting!
Applies perfectly to the fallacy of evolution. Yeah?
So this proves that God does not exist, right?
I once dated a girl who I shared the same birthday with. Our mothers had the same name, middle name and birthday. We both had 3 siblings, 2 brothers named Ryan and David, 1 adopted sister named Elisa. Both adopted siblings killed themselves. Both of our fathers died within a month of each other. Since our breakup we have both been engaged, with the people we were engaged to both dying in a head on collision with each other on a bridge.
Then you’re “one in a million”. (Or some other large number). That is, there must be many millions of people who have never experienced that level of coincidence in their lives. I know I haven’t.
But then, what are the chances that a reader of this blog would have a coincidence like that (given the size of the readership)?
There is no such thing as random chance. Randomness is practically impossible to generate, maybe totally impossible. The things we observe are the only possible outcomes of the series of all events prior. It’s not chance. It’s not fate. It’s quantum mechanics.
The point about attribution error is correct. We all suffer from it. I do especially. The perception of events as random is a fundamental attribution error. I wish that people would stop perpetuating the myth of random chance.
What, no mention of Poker anywhere???
Boy, do people start seeing random outcomes as a pattern in THAT game! After all, when your opponent draws out on you on the last card in Texas Hold Em against something like 8:1 or 9:1 odds several times in a row – and when it’s costing you REAL MONEY – it’s really easy to start seeing “patterns” – like cheating, or “unlucky seat”… Where in fact people who take Poker seriously and play it on a regular basis have a much better empirical grasp of probability in general and clusters specifically (sometimes you just sit there and get GREAT CARDS one hand after the next – sometimes for hours!!!… and sometimes it’s so bad you feel like folding without looking…)
Oh, and Determinism is irrelevant (to me at least) because even though the outcome of a given experiment is dependent on combination of pre-existing factors – if we cannot reliably predict the outcome based on available information – then the outcome is random.
I’ve read some of your articles, to be honest; yours is just another self delusion saying you’ve just overcame the initial delusion. The best example for this is; when you are arguing about Sharpshooter Fallacy, you are actually using the “cluster of information” you see fit to your argument.
Disproving a conclusion without arguing about it over it’s context is really easy. Kennedy-Lincoln similarities could be a coincidence or not, both sides arguing these will use their own observations. It’s even more obvious when you begin this article with supporting the coincidence with lining up the supportive data and then lining-up the counter-data which makes the reader go “Aaah, that’s because!”. I advise people to go back to the beginning after reading the article completely, the coincidental data is still there, rock solid. It’s just about the conclusion you want. This is probably a well-known fact but I’m only pointing this out just because your fashion is “but look I’m correct.”
Good luck.
David,
Thanks for your reply above.
Recent news about vaccinations: New U.S. Gov’t Study Shows NO Damage from Vaccines, Court Cases and Foreign Countries Prove Otherwise (http://www.activistpost.com/2010/09/new-us-govt-study-shows-no-damage-from.html).
Again, if one believes the [industry-funded] American ‘scientific’ studies….
GREAT stuff – I have written about this Fallacy in the context of baseball many times. nice job laying it out.
I think foul (September 13, 2010 2:20 pm) said it best “that its too tidy an explanation” and ” its too easy to use this explanation to dismiss everything that is otherwise unexplained coincidence – you can only do that if you know everything – and that, we don’t!”
Not every pattern is random. The coincidences between Kennedy and Lincoln certainly could be random (as I suspect they are) but the similarities are pretty significant and eerie. Of course there are nearly infinite differences between their situations (different gun, different hair, etc.) but the major ones are being shot – one in Ford Theatre, one in a Ford Lincoln – on a Friday, next to his wife, by an assassin with 3 names(15 letters); succeeded by a Johnson; neither assassin brought to trial. Based on the major similarities concerning a significant event, I wouldn’t totally dismiss something beyond coincidence. To do so would require us to dismiss the notion of “significance” – which appears to be the thrust of the article.
The assassination of a president might not be significant in relation to the geologic development of Pluto, but that doesn’t mean it is not significant. Using the logic presented here, any series of symptoms can be dismissed as lacking meaning. Whether a patient lives or dies is not “significant” in relation to the randomness of the universe and any effort will likely be futile as symptoms are the result of that randomness. There is a major logical fallacy at work here. You are not so smart, You Are Not So Smart.
By the way, the hot hand effect in sports isn’t settled, with scholarly papers coming out on both sides. Read for instance this paper indicating that it is real: “Revisiting the Hot Hand Theory with Free Throw Data in a Multivariate Framework”, J. Arkes, Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, Volume 6, Issue 1 2010. (http://www.bepress.com/jqas/vol6/iss1/2)
yea nice one man. but its not really addressing the key issue. Why?
Why was both Lincoln and Kennedy assassinated?
Why was the titanic sunk?
Why did someone like Hitler exist?
I mean its great that this guy is comparing facts and what not, but what does it matter without the motivations behind the facts. He is right that some coincidences are uncanny but so what? Just because two event has some great coincidences the motivation behind these coincidences are ignored? Personally I don’t even believe in coincidence. Everything happens for a reason. So if you can answer the why’s then the coincidental facts become irrelevant.
Human behave in patterns, thats why even though to events may not be identical, there is some link between the events. I mean there is some inspiration behind any human behavior. so if someone read a book about sinking a giant ship, maybe they though that was a great plot to kill some of England’s richest men, to secure world banking (this goes somewhat to explaining the why about the titanic, research who was actually on the ship before scoffing ;) )
To bring up some old topics, why if we are here by random is there no naturally formed electronics? Or other man made inventions that occur naturally? would you agree that to have these inventions there needs to be an inventor? or creator? think about that one. theres been plenty of time for nature to randomly create these things. because compared to natural bio machines, ie animals, human machines don’t even come close to comparing. even with our elite engineering. oh and thermodynamics is against the random generation of useful things because the universe is continually increasing in entropy (random choas) so if you ask me there has been some input to counteract the thermodynamics.
I would also like to make this statement. The day Darwin’s Theory of Evolution becomes Darwin’s Law of Evolution, I will denounce creation. Something tells me thats never gonna happen ;).
To close ill leave you with the boundary between the salty and sweet water. Enjoy :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7laxNgKwR4
do some more research on psychology and science….you really should
Absolutely fantastic read. Very profound. :)
*Tweets this article on Twitter*
Looks that prophets have been forecasting the names of the newspaper articles, not the actual future after all.I wish that everyone would stop perpetuating the myth of random chance.
David–
You’ve outdone yourself with this one.
Simply fantastic…..although it might leave some of us a bit crestfallen.
I think the article is not so much saying that everything that happened up to now is meaningless random chance, but that not everything that has happened necessarily had any significant/meaningful correlation to the past events that may or may not have led to its its happening.
Down to a certain level, you can argue that nothing is random, and that every single vibration of an atom anywhere in space/time has a direct or indirect effect on what will happen. However, it is also theoretically impossible to ever measure/calculate such interactions (uncertainty principle). Therefore, as far as humans are concerned, I think the concept of “random” simply refers to anything that we cannot account for or predict to a certain degree of accuracy. How random you think the world is depends on what you think that degree of accuracy is.
Nice, thx. Going to recommend this.
However, some critique:
– you fail to recognize that there are also testable correlations to be found and deductively explained in large datasets which *do* reflect underlying processes and/or conditions.
- you fail to acknowledge the scale-dependency of geographical analysis tools.
Nevertheless, point made: don’t trust your intuition to far. It’s going to see patterns…
Great post! Your posts have this way of being long but hard to “put down”. What I’m saying is, once I pop, the fun don’t stop…
Charlie Brooker link fuck yeah
As much as determining that there might be a “Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy” at play when judging a really random phonamenon, we could make the reverse mistake too: attributing something which does truly have a cause, to mere randomness. Those 25 women in that Australian office, could have developed it through a causal factor, which the authorities failed or were unwilling to pinpoint. Such could be the case with too many people developing cancers in a cluster point. Our knowledge can never be judged as absolute. Even the seemingly absurd coincidences between Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy could at least partially be explained away through logic (If you don’t believe me, try me).
I guess what I mean is, no matter how much I read your articles, or others’ for that matter, I not only do not become smarter, but those gray areas of the unknown factors (I refer you to “Black Swan”) become more outstanding. I guess that means I’m becoming smarter.
In any case, I feel your articles make my brain breathe deeply and it is always a great joy to read them. Keep up the good work David. One of my wishes in life is one day to meet you so we could sit down and talk for hours and I could keep wondering how you could be so “not so smart” (meaning smart of course).
l
Well written article, but incomplete in that it theorizes a fallacy(which may be likened to asserting a meaning, that is, drawing a bulls-eye around the author’s examples) but fails to provide a meaning for the presence and prevalence of the fallacy. Just saying “you are not so smart” is catchy, yet it appears humans are at the top of the earth’s food chain (or close, if you count bacteria). Does the sharpshooter have evolutionary survival value? If so, it is not simply a fallacy, it is a necessary fallacy. please explain or offer a theory for its existence. If it does not have survival value, then please explain why we exhibit it in spite of that fact..
Norton Mansfield – thanks. You imply that the discourse needs to go to another level. I agree.
The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy theory is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the ‘old one’. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice. ;)
But, as you well know, appearances can be deceiving, which brings me back to the reason why we’re here. We’re not here because we’re free. We’re here because we’re not free. There is no escaping reason; no denying purpose. Because as we both know, without purpose, we would not exist.
It is purpose that created us.
Purpose that connects us.
Purpose that pulls us.
That guides us.
That drives us.
It is purpose that defines us.
Purpose that binds us.
We are here because of you, Mr McRaney. We’re here to take from you what you tried to take from us.
Purpose.
I enjoyed your article :)
The fallacy dot is a necessity. During research work you need it otherwise there is no starting point. But don’t concentrate on one dot then. I think the Texas Sharpshooter can make many bulls eyes. You need even many dots and rule out the one’s they make no sense.
Kennedy was not assassinated in a Lincoln, but rather a Cadillac.
“Recognizing this is an important part of ignoring coincidences when they don’t matter and realizing what has real meaning for you on this planet, in this epoch”
I support your premise and would only add this: “Real meaning” as you describe above should certainly include the meaning based on first principles, which you and I prefer. But we cannot discount also the meaning brought by the interpretation of others and their resulting actions.
It’s all well and good to discount the influence of the position of stars in the night sky on the day of your birth as having an impact on your personality, but if the hot blonde believes she isn’t compatible with Pisces men, it won’t do you a lick of good…
Just thought I’d recommend the book “The Black Swan” by Nicholas Nassim Taleb to anyone who enjoyed this.
Hmmmm…well now..everything is just random chance..try to use that argument when you stand before Him.
Great article. I always find it funny when you argue with people about religion, and some of them agree that it’s nicer to have some kind of belief than just accepting randomness. Then you point out that they’ve already accepted it, just refuse to think about it too much. I like your (or Carl Sagan’s) point, something people never get about atheists: not having a religion doesn’t mean you can’t find happiness or wonder in life!
RE: Dylan comment:
“Most data is in clusters and most clusters have a cause because the world is the result of cause and effect. Where we are most weak in our thinking is in guessing at the cause, not in assuming there is one.:
Relativity and quantum mechanics have forced physicists to abandon these assumptions as exact statements of what happens at the most fundamental levels, but they remain valid at the level of human experience. In the case of a mis-attribution of a cause to an effect, the event is known as questionable cause. (Processes and Causality by John F. Sowa)
Related reading:
http://www.cut-the-knot.org/do_you_know/coincidence.shtml
In a way I feel conflicted about the notion that everything is based on chance and that there are no connections. Yes, it’s human nature to draw connections, especially where there is none, but chance is really only the starting cause for a series of events (even if those events may be influenced by chance to some degree).
An example about me and my girlfriend is in order:
I love an animated motion picture, “Balto”. Been with me since I was a kid.
When I was 15 years old, I found a Balto fansite (completely by chance). I chose to join it and then I quickly made my way into their team of community moderators. My girlfriend worked there so that’s when we first were made aware of each others’ existence.
Neither of us were even remotely in love at the time and we began collaborating on staff projects and our assigned tasks. This was the beginning of a rather unlikely friendship.
It didn’t take long before we gave each other our MSN details and we began chatting regularly.
Last year, she and I had a lot of issues with one of her old friends who had a personal issue with me (because I seemed to be more important to her than him, I guess). This caused a lot of trouble for all three of us and after we’d both admitted that we had a crush on each other the following months, this friend of hers made every effort to sabotage this forming relationship.
My GF & I finally gave him an ultimatum and both he & I signed a contract to bury the war axe (and never spoke since then).
Next, we met face to face for the first time April, 2010, and since then our relationship’s blossomed. We both complete each other with our strengths and flaws. We still have a long way ahead of us together, but I am convinced that we’ll only grow stronger together.
Now, she and I met because of the small chance that I joined a website she was committed to, which set in motion a long chain of events (that may or may not have been influenced by chance) which led to our first actual meeting.
I’m not so smart, I admit. And perhaps that is why I have issues with accepting the possibility of our relationship to have been formed because of an exclusive chain of random factors, but the way I see it, things just do not happen by chance.
I believe that things do happen for a reason. But that reason lies in the past and not in that “it’s meant to happen”.
If I kick a dog, there’s a chance someone might see it or there’s a chance I might get away with it.
If someone saw it, there’s a chance this someone knew me, was the owner or both. If this someone was the owner and/or this someone knew me, there’s a big chance that I’d be in trouble for kicking said dog.
Even if the reason for something that happened (cause) was random, the chain of events that set in motion (effect) happened because of that. So the cause creates an effect that is influenced by random factors related to what set off the events in the first place. If that makes sense.
Why is this so-called sharpshooter shooting random holes all over the side of a barn? Wouldn’t that make him a not-so-good shooter?
Fantastic piece, thank you. As a professional investor, and speculator, I see the “Sharpshooter Fallacy” and many other failures in cognition in the analysis of financial markets. Reading your posts and the diverse comments related to them offers a great look at the human mind. Thanks for the good work.
i was thinking of a kitty cat on my way home from work today. when i got home i ate a sandwich because i was hungry. i also like tug boats
Hmmmm… not quite convinced. I mean, on part of it I am but some coincidences are just too incredible to deny, the Titan/Titanic thing being one of them. Yes there were billions of circumstances that were not similar and only a handful that were, however, odds of two things not being the same are extremely high, whereas odds of two things being THAT similar are extremely low. String together several occurrences in one happening, each as unlikely as the next, and you can’t sit there and tell me “Oh it’s no big deal, it was all random chance.” Sure, it was random chance, but it’s spooky as hell.
The “stretched examples” drawn are only as stretched as the examples themselves, i.e. they are unrelated because they are the random events in which people perceived imaginary meanings, such events just HAPPEN to be not be related. Furthermore the excessive paragraphing isn’t so much of a paragraph as a stylistic break commonly utilized by blogs. This is a blog, not a scholarly article. Why don’t you get off your pompous ass and contribute instead of going around critiquing others on what they are doing wrong. I would sympathize if your response was even a little constructive.
I have to disagree. In reading this it seems there’s an omission of logic. Looking at your presidential example, there’s no arguing that there are infinite differences between the two men. However, were you to compare Kennedy to say, Washington, there are even more differences. Or Lincoln to Nixon. Or Nixon to Washington. Very few similarities arise. It’s the fact that a larger number of similarities than is normal surfaces with those two particular presidents that make it noteworthy.
As with the date scenario. The odds are far greater that those similarities wont be there than the odds that they will, and that is what makes coincidences remarkable. Patterns arising when the odds are against it.
Lastly, you are absolutely correct when you say that it’s just the way that math works out sometimes. It is. But the fact that math works out that way is in and of itself both amazing and beautiful, and to see it occur in our daily lives is equally amazing, and failure to recognize the beauty of that is a real shame.
Im sorry but it seems as though you have created and subscribed to an idea that dismisses evidence, be it perfectly legible, or obviously known and accepted. Sigh.
I am very fortunate that I stomached the first few paragraphs of this article.
Conspiracy theorists are the anathema of the human race, I always find them to be single tracked and closed minded people. Drawing some targets of my own around the single tracked mind bullethole would logically lead me to believe that as well as their original branding, they can’t stop thinking about sex. Now as we all know (target #2) conspiracy theorists are on the whole geeks. This would lead me to a conclusion via a socialogical argument that they don’t have much sex… therefore they are all wankers.
The rest of the article was excellent! Thank you!
DB
“Conspiracy theorists are the anathema of the human race, I always find them to be single tracked and closed minded people.”
Any human activity that involves more than one person can be construed as a conspiracy, so to deny that conspiracies exist represents perhaps the extreme of close-mindedness, a camp into which you apparently place yourself.
For example, with the events of 9-11, obviously a conspiracy was involved, since more than one person was, involved, and their plans were made in secret.
The ‘conspiracy theorists’ (a psyop term btw) you would refer to in this case are the ones that don’t passively accept ‘let us not tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories’ from the mouths of people proposing the most outrageous and completely indefensible conspiracy theory of all, the official government one.
1) People who despise ‘conspiracy theorists’ don’t believe in conspiracies, thus
2) have never participated with others in creating or executing a plan that is not fully public,
3) which implies limited interaction with other human beings,
4) including sex, which is generally planned and carried out in private, leading to the inescapable conclusion that
5) if they have at least one hand and a dick,
6) they are wankers.
Are you arguing against causality? Because although not stated specifically, it seems this is the argument you are leaning towards, or at least a logical next step. Which is just slightly silly. I understand the abstract concepts here but it seems you are, much like those who you argue against, making a sweeping generality against all situations where the cause is obtained from observing the effects. Which once again is just silly, and a tad pretentious. Sorry, if that seemed harsh, my best regards.
WHOA!
It is SO totally weird that I came across this site when looking for “you are not so smart” in Google. Getting a direct hit like that is just pure luck. Or fate. Your choice.
I mean, I even clicked on the “I’m feeling lucky button.” What are the odds of THAT happening?
I am a little late to the party here, but I just wanted to point out that this article may be confusing to some because it presents two distinct points without clearly differentiating between them.
1. If you take a set of truly random data and observe only a part of it, you may very well see patterns. Assigning meaning to them is the [Texas] Sharpshooter Fallacy.
2. Many data sets that you assume should be random, really aren’t. This is the case with several of the examples given. For example, cancer distributions are probably influenced by many factors including those mentioned in the article (similar eating/smoking/exercise habits within regions, a tendency to be employed by the nearby asbestos factory, etc). The lesson from this point is that even when you’ve identified a statistically significant pattern, you still need to be very careful about asserting cauastion.
This article doesn’t actually exist. The poster was simply banging away randomly at the keyboard. The sequence of letters which appeared only SEEM to be coincidental, because it formed perfect sentences. However, the odds of these perfect sentences being formed are the same odds as complete unrecognizable garbage being formed.
It is only through the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy that you, dear reader, have convinced yourself that this is actually an article, and not just the random keyboard bashings of a madman.
Furthermore, this comment doesn’t exist, either. It, too, is a completely random set of characters.
I design slot machines and this is absolutely what makes them work .. people are horrible at evaluating causation.
Something causes cancer clusters, even if it is smoking or similar genetics. Clusters are not cause-less. All cancer has a cause. All life has a cause. Part of the same chain of events.
Since genetic science can now cure disease, dismissing genetic cause undermines the point of looking for a cause. You want a cause so you can mitigate the cause, but then you ignore the cause because it’s not environmental? Why would you do that when non-environmental causes can also be mitigated?
Ah! But people WANT mystery and amazement. Logical thought destroys too much of that! That’s why unthinking insanity is the order of the day!
Drawing those bulls eyes seems to make anything make sense. That clarified for me why conspiracy theories make so much sense. I also think of stuff happening to me. Seeing a friend in a huge city at a random Subway station, no relation whatsoever but in fact we both just like the park nearby and we had both off and the weather was nice and we hadn’t been in a long time….So fascinating how humans automatically try to make sense of everything and find connections. It must be our nature.
It seems to me that the point you are making is pretty simplistic. “You COULD be wrong” And yea it makes a lot of sense that people not seeing the full picture will make faulty conclusions and that you will look for reason in chaos. But it seems to me you are counting out that there is validity if the conclusions is practical. All information should be reevaluated upon new information.
So sure lincon and Kennedy have a lot of strange similarity’s and alot of differences, but the differences don’t de-vaule the similarity. I think my over all problem with the article is you seem to say that the positive is unknown( in the sense that its not a fully contained conclusion) therefore the negative must be true.
Other then that one bit your absolutely right people have no concept of probability or statistics. Which is why i think that statistics and probability should be a required credit iin schools (i am from Canada).
So once again nice article i really enjoyed it but disagree with the over all tone/way you said it.
Smoke weed everyday.
Thanks for this iconoclastic piece – worthy of reflection – I like your writing and the light though weighty comments from the visitors here
I tried to explain this to a friend that bases his life on horoscopes and fortune cookies, but I think it’s willful ignorance at this point.
OMG! My horoscope said good news was on the way, and I found $5 on the sidewalk! It’s so accurate!
*bashes face into wall*
Love this article. Entirely engaging, well articulated and cleanly presented. Though I especially appreciate your wealth of commenters. If a blog is a brownie, the commenters are those crunchy edge pieces. Mmmmm crunchy edge pieces.
So let me get a few things straight. I’m going to try to make this as unbiased as possible. What you are essentially saying is everything is random. Okay, I can agree with that to an extent. I agree that yes, pretty much everything is random but it’s not necessarily drawing a bullseye around a bullet hole it is simply noticing how that bullet that made the hole that was shot completely at random managed to make it through the barn and perhaps hit a lamp on the inside that fell over on some hay and set the whole barn on fire. I would say that yes most times we are trying to find correlations between different events that just happen because as humans we are confused about our existence and we are constantly searching for explanations to things that go on instead of considering that things happen just because they may as well happen then not. But I think you can still find it as a fascinating coincidence that is not necessarily connected in any way. But, if we believe your theory, then we may as well dismiss probability once and for all and take everything as random. Then there goes the math of all probability and then you may as well get rid of everything we know altogether because if everything is completely random and has no particular order than how can you know anything in the first place. If everything is as you so random and has no correlation whatsoever. So this kind of begs the question how can we know anything? but that is an epistemological debate for another place. So to close, in saying that things are random we have to know that things are random.
I’ve read most of your recent blogs, and I commend you for supporting rational thought. Seeing meaning where there is none is an effect of a brain that evolved to create meaning no matter what; apparently, it helps us survive. Your points are excellent, and at this point in in our evolution, being rational is surely our best path for survival.
However, this entry on coincidence makes me want to share a problem I have with the rational reflex to immediately dismiss all coincidences without even trying to do the math. All coincidences are not created equal. Most are perfectly understood as finding patterns after the fact, but there remain a very few that are so impossible, I suggest they deserve contemplation. Is it possible they offer a clue to something we don’t understand about reality? Why be closed minded to even considering this possibility?
Actually, I can answer that: it is almost never worth the effort because either it is simply randomness or else it is beyond understanding. Nonetheless, I’ve experienced a few super coincidences in my life that I enjoy deeply. They remind me that the universe is more mysterious then I can imagine. Sometimes they are worth the effort. Unfortunately, the best coincidences are hard to share; by definition, they are not believable.
I used to believe in skepticism, but now I’m not so sure.
Maybe I’ll bookmark this good blog with some other from Reuters Oddly enough. Quite a feat.
Really nice and amusing blog, congrats!
Still, as far as this post is concearned, I feel it is much too far fetched. And that’s because if one really makes oneself into believing that everything is meaningless and just plain random like that tree, which is a common scientific fallacy, than nothing in fact has any meaning. Then why bother getting up in the morning, eh? See what it means?
And it goes without mentioning that there would be no laws out there for our smart and clever sciencies and scientists to study.
Thanks very much for some very interesting reading.
If you take the view that the universe is chaotic, then this all makes sense. Up to a point. The cancer clusters thing is not an example of proving that patterning due to causes is a myth but of failing to find causes. All that can be concluded is that no causes could be found, not that there are no causes. New causes are being discovered all the time that were unknown before.
I know some researchers that predicted a result of an experiment ahead of time. That is clearly painting the barn before the gun was shot. Target hit. They made the same prediction and repeated that experiment 57 times. Target hit every time, more or less, but every time within the range of the bullseye, not outside. A study of these experiments was submitted to a leading scientific journal which published the results, with their own interpretation. It should be noted that the study was done using the rigorous methods of the scientific community represented by the journal. The journal’s review board explanation of why the target was hit did not fit into the world view of the peer review panel, so their comments clearly attempted to erase the target and MOVE it somewhere else. They said they would review their own methods for faults. Clearly this is a case of “we’ll see it when we believe it.”
Physicists are legendary for thinking that there is nothing but laws of physics that create and run the universe, and use this as a reasoning to deny any higher intelligence associated with it. The majority of physicists and unified field theorists don’t think there is a God, and thus attribute cold dead chance behind the creation of the universe. The Unified Field is theorized to be the ultimate basis of all creation, containing within it the seed form of all the laws of physics. Regardless of all the variations in it’s nuances, overall the Unified Field theories are far and away the most successful (meaning it fits the evidence so far) Theory of Everything humans have conceived.
Some theorists have come to ascribe intelligence as an inherent aspect of the Unified Field. Stephen Hawking recently said, “I don’t claim that God doesn’t exist. God is the name people give to the reason we are here. But I think that reason is the laws of physics rather than someone with whom one can have a personal relationship. An impersonal God.” —Time Magazine interview, November 15, 2020, Page 4, Indian edition.
Most people ascribe personality to intelligence. They anthropomorphize God. I tend to think Hawking is right, that God isn’t really a “Who” like a personality, but a “What.” Yet there is a fundamental flaw in the logic that the Unified Field of all the laws of physics is inert, devoid of consciousness. The most striking example of this flaw hit me when I heard an exchange years ago that can be summed up like this:
“I take issue with your statement that the Unified Field is consciousness.”
“Do you agree that the Unified Field contains everything that exists in it? That all phenomena expressed in the universe is attributable to the expressions of the Unified Field? That there can’t be anything outside the Unified Field?”
“I think that is a correct understanding.”
“Now tell me, do you consider yourself to be an intelligent person?”
“Why, yes, I do find myself to be so, and others have commented so.”
“Then if everything that exists must by definition be an aspect of the Unified Field, surely you can see that even your intelligence which you take to be real must also be a quality of the field. Thus, intelligence must be inherent in the field. As the expression of intelligence is one function of consciousness, then consciousness itself must be a quality of the field. And since the field is unified and the cause of all that exists, consciousness cannot be ruled out as the singular true quality of the Unified Field.”
No further argument.
The fact is we can only see what we truly believe. If you don’t believe something could be possible, you will simply deny that it is, to keep your sense of order. Fact is, you CREATE your own internal order. Thus creating orderliness is inherent within the Unified Field. Even entropy is actually quite an orderly process within the bigger picture of nature.
So while the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy is a valid explanation for how people tend to make a mistaken sense of the world, we have to be careful to not interpret NO bulls eyes painted on a barn where holes exist as someone ONLY being a lousy shot, and thus “make” chaos of the world. Maybe the gunslinger was shooting at flies?
I cannot help but feel this logic of this exchange you present is rather muddled.
Allow me to demonstrate my point by bringing forth another imaginary conversation:
“Do you agree that the Unified Field contains everything that exists in it?”
“I think that is a correct understanding.”
“So, my dear chap, you would agree that birds are a part of the United Field?”
“But of course, and necessarily so.”
“Why, then flying must necessarily also be a quality of the field. Thus, flying must be inherent in the field. And since the field is unified and the cause of all that exists, flying cannot be ruled out as the singular true quality of the Unified Field.”
Nothing further.
You posted this on Sept 11! You must be a terrorist *totally missing point of article*
:)
Young’s Literal Translation – Here is the wisdom! He who is having the understanding, let him count the number of the beast, for the number of a man it is, and its number
is six hundred and sixty six.
I am a prophet of the bible.
Have an ear… the hour is here… like a thief in the night.
The number is perfect. The signature of God.
I was born 75 years to the day after Earthquake No. 333
caused by Nikola Tesla,
or I would have never been told.
My social security# is six hundred and sixty-six.
My Federal E.I.N. for Insight, llc. ends 666.
I have counted the number of the beast,
and with insight I calculate the number Tesla’s Trinity.
I bring proof from God by solving the riddle of Nikola Tesla.
Tesla caused the 1899 Cape Yakataga and Yakutat bay earthquakes with The Knob Hill Apparatus from his Colorado Springs lab. That is why he spent his last ten years and died in Room #3327.
3h03m27s on September 3, 1899.
A second divisible by 3,
in a minute divisible by 3,
in an hour divisible by 3,
on a day divisible by 3,
in a month divisible by 3,
in a year divisible by 3
TIMES THREE.
And for Christ’s sake it was Earthquake Milne Shide No. 333!
“All repeated acts or operations I performed had to be divisible by three and if I missed I felt impelled to do it again, even if it took hours.” -Nikola Tesla (After Causing Earthquakes)
“If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 & 9;
then you would have a key to the universe.”
-Nikola Tesla
Earthquake Shide No. 333
Three plus three is six, plus 3 is nine.
A three squared 27 day man-made seismic event.
Sept. 3″69″
Professional Paper 69
U.S. Geological Survey 69
by Lawrence Tarr and Ralph Martin
Published 1912
http://tinyurl.com/twentyseven
–
CALL 1-888-823-2679 YOURPENGUY
Really nice read. Although putting the evolution of the eyeball up to blind chance (no pun intended) is, in my opinion wrong. I think it a common misconception to equal evolution to coincidence when so much evidence points to the fact that it is a slow meticulous process of selection that works through a very recognizable dynamic. Richard Dawkins explains it extremely well in both “The God Delusion” and “The Greatest Show On Earth”.
“Everyone loves pizza. Many people hate rutabagas.”
aha. marry pizza, and divorce (annul?) rutabagas!
so maybe i’ll JUST BURN THE D@MM BARN DOWN!
“*bashes face into wall*”
i knew that was coming… check out my predictions…
“Everyone loves Monty Python.”
- Not everyone, I have always think it’s absolutely
useless and not even little funny in anyway.
The world is a bell curve whether you like it or not folks. Or in some cases a binomial distribution, Poisson, etc. Check out Dr. Edwards Deming and his red beads.
Can you still say it’s the Texas sharp shooter if you omitted some information to the story? I was reading up to the spot where you revealed some of the other information to the stories of Lincoln, Titanic, and Hitler; does it still count if the information was not available when you first ready the story? It would be wrong to say that I ignored it because it wasn’t there to be ignored in the first place.
I do happen to like the article, though :) I just think the example was a little iffy — is all :)
Agree with Andy from Sept 4, but instead of reading The Drunkards Walk for more of this, just read it to get a longer version of what was posted here. The earlier examples were familiar, and the later ones as well. Eventually I realized that I had heard of these examples, arguments, and conclusions before. This post was posted after the Books release, and I can only find Andy’s comment that makes any kind of reference at all to the book. Life can’t so random that this is just coincidence.
Paul
Wow! I’m a baby, but some of you people have not even hatched yet. This is the blind leading blind. This is the blind reinforcing and comforting their blindness.
Don’t even mention the word ‘dawkins’ to me. This is your great messiah? This is the answer for you? How easily you are spoon-fed?
So what is the point of this article? It’s obviously written with extreme intelligence, as it has several undertones that have the potential to subliminally brainwash you.
Jedi mind tricks.
First subliminal undertone programming: There is no such thing as a conspiracy.
—- Hmmm.
Second subliminal undertone programming: If something looks supernatural to you. Never explore it further, because it is not possible.
You hit the bulls-eye! Right?
Third subliminal undertone programming: Since conspiracies or the supernatural do not exists, then God cannot exists and dawkins is your messiah.
I suspect this article was written by a member of the ‘elite’ group that runs this planet.
Unfortunately, not all of you can see this. Many of you never will see it. That will cost you.
There ‘is’ a supernatural. There ‘is’ a spirit world. Many have felt it. Some have seen it. Oh, it’s real alright.
Did nostradamus predict some future events? Seems he might have. Have others successfully predicted the future. Yes, they have. But remember, man , in and of himself, is ‘not’ a god. Man cannot predict the future. There are only ‘two’ sources of information regarding the future. One is from God himself; and the other is from the darkside, who has limited information about the future.
Was nostradamus a prophet? Not according to the Bible. The Bible states that a ‘true prophet’ is Never Wrong.
So where did nostradamus get his information? Not from God, that’s for sure.
I realize that many of you have never experienced anything you could say was ‘supernatural’. However, I know that you have had to make a decision on the subject many times throughout your life so far. So each time you are face with this decision, did you ever consider that perhaps it is ‘you’ that is the problem?… always making the ‘bulls-eye’ … every time.
Given a long enough time frame, every single possibility will play out.
This article describes that principle quite well, but the perspective seems a bit too nihilistic for my taste.
Looking back at the events that have lead to me being here right now, it seems amazing that I’m alive at all, let alone responding to the thoughts of another human being through a series of wires and signals. This possibility was bound to play out, and by logic there is no significant meaning to it.
I agree and disagree with that notion. We as human beings are assemblages of atoms that are aware of the fact that we are assemblages of atoms. To say that there is no meaning to the fact that there are self-aware chemical constructs seems silly to me. If simple, carbon-based life has the ability to think, is it really insane to say that the overall universe may have some sort of rationale behind it? Specific events may not have any particular meaning, but a universe made of pieces that are capable of being self-aware seems like it might have a purpose.
But I guess it’s really just a matter of perspective. No matter how many scientific explanations that are made for the existence of love, it doesn’t change the feeling it brings. I suppose I view coincidences the same way from time to time.
<>
Incorrect on at least one count – the idea of the “hot hand” in basketball takes into account the times the ball misses also.
I want to marry this article and have its babies.
I enjoyed this. Have you read The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles? There’s a beautiful passage where he describes our conception of the sky as a familiar blue bowl covering our heads, when in fact we are seeing only a thin atmospheric haze between us and endless emptiness.
I think the scariest Kennedy/Lincoln parallel is this:
A week before his death, Abraham Lincoln was in Monroe, Maryland.
Coincidence?
ROFL
This post is fantastic !
Drawing a circle around a cluster of bullet holes = Factorial Analysis (something that psychologists love, by the way). Calling the cluster a “bull’s-eye” and claiming it must be a real entity = Reification.
On another note, can you say that our inept gunman was _trying_ to spray the barn uniformly, or even randomly? We might have a priori reasons to expect that he was pointing his gun _somewhere_. So a significant cluster could very well represent some quirk of his aim or shooting technique. It might not be the actual point he was trying to hit. He may or may not have been aiming for a specific spot. We may argue about the meaning of the cluster &/or cede that we can’t be sure of it’s causes.
Of course it’s random chance but let me say a few things that ruins this article.
1. I haven’t read Titan so no I didn’t ignore the facts you stated because you didn’t tell them to us before hand. You painted the bullseye not me.
2. Having different hair, religions or even death locations or killed by different weapons doesn’t increase or decrease the chance that it was or wasn’t random those variables don’t necessarily matter. If the shots miss the barn or the gun jams no holes are formed they are just small details that don’t change the outcome.
As far as if it’s random or not in reality holes in the story can’t be used as a defense against it being random. If the powers that control the events had the power to make it happen the way it happened they might not bother themselves with every little detail or they may do it in a way that leaves doubt. Placing the gun at the target firing every shot into it then stepping back and firing holes everywhere else to cause the debate and make over thinkers over think.
The real question you should be asking is what was the sharpshooter thinking? Can he really shoot straight if he want’s to? The barn comes second to the shooter who might be a good enough aim to miss on purpose.
Here,here! Thank you for that bit of fresh air on a topic growing stale. Original thinking occurs right before our eyes!