I know people who defend almost to the death opinions such as “If you eat GMOs, you will die!” Frankly, it’s difficult to know what to believe, in many cases. Living under high voltage transmission lines will slowly kill you.Organic food is more healthy that GMO (genetically modified organism) food.
That’s a jaw-dropping claim! It makes me wonder about all the scare headlines I have read over the years: How common are Texas Sharpshooter Fallacies? John Ioannidis guesstimates in an open-access PLOS paper that 90% of published medical research is flawed. Ninety percent of published medical research is flawed?! As with any fraud, the fields of study-and ultimately you and I-are the victims. In this hypothetical example, the bullet hole is the curious correlation you “discovered.” Forming the hypothesis and doing the study corresponds to painting the target around the bullet hole. Morally compromised practitioners of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy #2 are motivated by the desire to get published, funded, and ultimately promoted in their careers. With counterfeit innocence, you propose, “Let’s see what the data says.” You look at the data and, Eureka!, your hypothesis was right! You publish a paper, get funded, and get a promotion. But you don’t, of course, come right out and say that. The just-in-time storage of sufficient uranium might be evidence for this conspiracy. Instead, you come up with a hypothesis about a secret conspiracy to kill everyone who has a doctorate in math, using some sort of radiation. You note a correlation in your data between “Math doctorates awarded annually” and “Uranium stored at US nuclear power plants.” 3 But you don’t tell anyone you discovered this curious correlation. Here’s how Fallacy #2 works (assuming you wanted to try it): You first example the data secretly. To make the shot look accurate, a target is then painted onto the wall, so that the bullet appears right in the middle of the bull’s-eye. Smith’s Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy #2 also uses a target as a metaphor. The conclusion might be a Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. Here’s a takeaway: The next time someone tells you something like “Don’t you know eating raisins causes plantar warts? It’s been proven in this peer-reviewed publication, right here!”, be politely skeptical. The new study came to the opposite conclusion: “High coffee consumption is associated with a reduced pancreatic cancer risk.” 2 Go figure.
#Sharpshooter fallacy update
A later, in-depth study, “Coffee Consumption and Pancreatic Cancer Risk: An Update Meta-analysis of Cohort Studies”, tested the McMahon team’s findings using more data. Coffee’s statistics showed a direct linkage to pancreatic cancer! 1 Brian MacMahon, the lead author of the study, quit coffee, as did others, frightened by the findings, published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.īut MacMahon’s research team’s bullet landed close to one of many bulls-eyes on the wall only coincidentally. The bullet hit close to the coffee bulls-eye. What about cigar smoking or drinking tea? Nope. But the bullet hole was not close to the smoking or alcohol bull’s-eyes. The researchers were searching for possible causes like smoking and alcohol consumption.
A great deal of data was gathered about the habits of people with pancreatic cancer. An example Smith offers is an actual research project into the causes of pancreatic cancer. No matter where the sharpshooter’s bullet hits the wall, it’s close to a bull’s-eye. In his book, Smith discusses the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacies, to which many fall prey as they search for statistical significance in data. Fallacy #1, for example, is illustrated by a big wall on which a large number of small targets are painted. He also notes that, as data gets larger and larger, nonsensical coincidences become more probable, not less. But in his fascinating new book The AI Delusion, economics professor Gary Smith reminds us that computers don’t have common sense. And the correlation between “People who drowned after falling out of a fishing boat” and the “Marriage rate in Kentucky” is 95.24%.Ĭommon sense tells us to treat these coincidences as jokes. Likewise, “Per capita cheese consumption” and “People who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets” has a correlation of 94.71%. For example, you can see the graph of “US spending on science, space and technology” superimposed on that of “Suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation.” The staggering 99.79% overlap is a classic in correlation without causation. You will get a chortle or two from Spurious Correlations, a web page devoted to graphically persuasive relationships among pairs of sets of entirely unrelated data. Share Facebook Twitter Print arroba Email
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