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I think that they are saying that you and/or TFA re: Utah may be making something like the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, or maybe even the exception that proves t
by aspenmayer 1y ago
I think that they are saying that you and/or TFA re: Utah may be making something like the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, or maybe even the exception that proves the rule of that fallacy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy
> The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is an informal fallacy which is committed when differences in data are ignored, but similarities are overemphasized. From this reasoning, a false conclusion is inferred. This fallacy is the philosophical or rhetorical application of the multiple comparisons problem (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.
> The name comes from a metaphor about a person from Texas who fires a gun at the side of a barn, then paints a shooting target centered on the tightest cluster of shots and claims to be a sharpshooter.
By not being able to account for the commonly held belief that Utah has a high standard of living, and by focusing on factors that may not be relevant to the standard of living in a specific regard due to local conditions, such as the lower incidence of childcare faciilties not coming up as much due to larger (extended) families filling the gap, while not accounting for that either way in their analysis because it was a blind spot to begin with and wasn't properly hypothesized before analysis, etc, this might be a version of an exception to the Texas sharpshooter fallacy that proves the rule, because it seems that there are actual sharpshooters around, and we find ourselves in Texas, hypothetically speaking.