Origin of the Texas Sharpshooter
The picture of the Texas sharpshooter is taken from an illustration by Dirk-Jan Hoek (CC-BY). The infamous Texas sharpshooter fires randomly at a barn door and then paints the targets around the bullet holes, creating the false impression of being an excellent marksman. The sharpshooter symbolizes the dangers of post-hoc theorizing, that is, of finding your hypothesis in the data.…
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