Texas sharpshooter fallacy

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The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is the statistical fallacy of inferring meaning from what is essentially a random distribution of data points. It is the philosophical or rhetorical application of the multiple comparisons problem (also known as data dredging or p-hacking in statistics) and apophenia (in cognitive psychology). It is related to the clustering illusion, which is the tendency in human cognition to interpret patterns where none actually exist, itself stemming from the tendency to underestimate the likelihood of clusters appearing in random or pseudorandom datasets. The name comes from an anecdote about a person in Texas who fires a gun at the side of a barn, with bullets landing in a random distribution. He then paints a target around the tightest cluster of shots and claims to be a sharpshooter.

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