But an epidemiological study ultimately showed that the cancer rate was no greater than that of the general population. Hexavalent chromium in the water supply of a small California town was blamed for causing cancer, resulting in a $333 million legal settlement and a movie starring Julia Roberts. … The Erin Brockovich incident, one of the most famous, is among the many that have been debunked. The story seems to have first appeared in print in 1977 5, and awareness of the story and its connection to a fallacy spread in the 1990s 6.Įach year…epidemiologists regularly hear from people worried that their town has been plagued with an unusually large visitation. The story of this Lone Star state shooter has given its name to a fallacy first described in the field of epidemiology, which studies how disease spreads in a population. 5Īs the story is told in the above quote, the Texas sharpshooter is a fabled marksman who fires his gun randomly at the side of a barn, then paints a bullseye around the spot where the most bullet holes cluster. Such a posteriori clusters are analogous to the story of the Texas sharpshooter who would shoot his rifle at the side of a barn and then carefully draw a target around each bullet-hole so that each bullet-hole passed exactly through the center of the “bull’s-eye.” Although a posteriori clusters do serve to demonstrate that cases can cluster in time and space, they do not allow for determining whether this is more than a chance occurrence. There have been several dramatic time-space clusters of leukemia reported in which, following an initial observation of two or more cases in a locality, a time unit and geographical area are selected so as to best define a time-space cluster. Sibling Fallacy: Cum Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc Quote… Taxonomy: Logical Fallacy > Informal Fallacy > Non Causa Pro Causa > The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy 4 Alias: The Texas Sharpshooter Effect 1, Method 2, Phenomenon 3, and Technique 2
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