Never Mind The Others

* From “The A**HOLE’S Guide To Arguing (Or, How To Succeed In Politics)”

Ever heard of the Texas sharpshooter?
Apparently the name comes from an old joke.

A Texan shoots random holes at the side of a barn. Afterwards he paints targets around the areas where he sees the tightest clusters of bullet holes, and calls himself a sharpshooter.

The fact that the hits are random do not matter, only that they appear to be clustered.

When this fallacy shows up, people are cherry-picking data that supports their beliefs, and purposefully ignoring the rest of the data in order to produce a pattern where none exists. Share on X

In politics, this could lead to policies and laws being implemented for all the wrong reasons.

“To protect this nation against terrorist, we need to ban all Saudi nationals from entering the US. We don’t need any more Bin Ladens or another 9/11 in this country.”

Here the speaker assumes that terrorists are located in a specific region, and that banning the people of that region from entering the country is therefore a good safety measure.

It ignores the fact that many terrorists are ‘home-grown’ and not foreigners. The speaker has focused on (painted a bullseye around) the data from 9/11 where most of the hijackers were Saudis, while ignoring the rest of the data (the home-grown terrorists and those from nations other than Saudi Arabia).

© Merlyn Gabriel Miller