Target failure
The target error , English Texas sharpshooter fallacy , is a term from the methodology of the empirical sciences . It describes the mistake of reasoning to infer a causal connection from an accumulation of events . In principle, however, causality can only be shown if the hypotheses are formulated before the experiment and then tested. The name refers to a Texan who accidentally fires his weapon at a barn door and then paints a target around the greatest number of hits.
This error often occurs as a side effect of data mining .
The error is closely associated with the clustering illusion , the human quality of seeing patterns in random data that do not exist .
Examples
- Attempts to find cryptograms in Shakespeare's sonnets focused primarily on those passages of the work for which the proposed decryption algorithm gave legible results.
- “The roulette ball fell on odd numbers eight times in a row. Something is wrong with that. ”The assumption that after a series of eight odd numbers the ball must fall on an even number is another fallacy , more precisely: a player's fallacy .
- When rare diseases occur, individual clusters are to be expected even with a statistically random distribution . If there is a nuclear power plant in one of these clusters, a fallacy of the type cum hoc ergo propter hoc or post hoc ergo propter hoc may occur . However, it should be examined whether, for example, leukemia in children also occurs more frequently in the vicinity of other nuclear power plants and, in particular, whether there are leukemia clusters outside nuclear power plants.
- Allegedly encoded events, names, places and times in texts represented by the Bible code .
See also
literature
- Beck-Bornholdt and Hans-Hermann Dubben : With certainty bordering on probability . Rowohlt 2005, ISBN 978-3-499-61902-1 , pp. 56–63 (chapter "The Texan Sniper")