Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy

The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is the statistical fallacy of inferring meaning from what is essentially a random distribution of data points, functioning as the philosophical or rhetorical application of the multiple comparisons problem, also known in statistics as data dredging or p-hacking, together with apophenia, a concept from cognitive psychology. It is related to the clustering illusion, the tendency in human cognition to interpret patterns where none actually exist, a tendency that itself stems from an underlying tendency to underestimate how likely clusters are to appear by chance in a random or pseudorandom dataset. The name comes from an anecdote about a person in Texas who fires a gun at random into the side of a barn, producing a random distribution of bullet holes, and only afterward paints a target around the tightest cluster of shots to claim to be a sharpshooter.