Texas sharpshooter fallacy

The myth (and lucrative business) of “entrepreneurship”

English: Cedar Rapids, IA, June 26, 2008 -- Th...
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I’ve learned a couple of pretty important lessons in my life:

  1. If everyone is zigging, you should zag. (AKA. Don’t buy the stock that the professors are buying.)
  2. Selling false hope is a common trick used to scam people out of money. (Self-help books are a common method.)

Number one is fairly obvious – in a soccer game, you don’t want to be where the ball is, you want to be where the ball is going. If you ever watch a young soccer league though, you’ll know what most people do in business. A small crowd of kids chasing after a ball – Brownian motion.

Number two is what “entrepreneurship” has become in the last 15 years. Before I was in university (in the 90s), it was “consulting,” but it’s the same basic idea. Various gurus (false prophets?) are going around North America telling us all “If you just quit your job and do this vague undefined task that you love to do, you’ll become insanely rich and not have to worry about work ever again.”
All you have to do is buy this book, pay to attend this founders roundtable, join this MBA class, pay to pitch to these VCs, buy from these financial consulting, etc. Do you notice the trend here? All you have to do is pay for it.

Note, you don’t always have to pay though, there are tons of well sponsored events with many large businesses presenting that would just love to have you attend and listen to how they are going to disrupt the world with technology x or idea y. The more people that attend these ones, the better. The money to be made isn’t from your ticket, but from your attendance. Ie. the new Facebook model of business, sell your users to your customers. This works especially well because the users are self-chosen. People who are interested in the new magic tech that will help them break through to the other side with their idea.

Yes, if you pay to attend the talk with the one founder who did break through the brick ceiling and come out reasonably unscathed on the other side, you might learn that one trick they did to become rich.

Yes, if you attend the found round table with Facebook’s lead engineer presenting how their updates to the API will change everything and that you should build apps on it right away if you want to be taken seriously as a business, you may just have that breakthrough moment.

However, I’m sorry to be blunt, but statistically you won’t.

Worse off, you’ll be falling for the Texas sharpshooter fallacy in the worst way possible. You will only see people who were successful and miss all of those who wasted their savings, ruined their marriages, hurt their friends and destroyed their career in the vague hope that their idea would be worth a billion dollars some day.

You’ll have fallen for the false prophets in the hopes of false profits.

My advice, which I give for free and you can take it if you want is: Enjoy your friends, build a beautiful family, find hope, joy and peace where you can, and when they all zig, you zag.

Only then can you get ahead of the ball.

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Texas Sharpshooter fallacy made large

Academia has a fascinating issue I’ve been pondering about recently. In essence, the fact that almost all journals have a clear and obvious bias towards positive results, there is almost a guaranteed texas sharpshooter fallacy that will occur over time when many many papers are written.

From wikipedia:

The Texas sharpshooter fallacy often arises when a person has a large amount of data at their disposal, but only focuses on a small subset of that data. Random chance may give all the elements in that subset some kind of common property (or pair of common properties, when arguing for correlation). If the person fails to account for the likelihood of finding some subset in the large data with some common property strictly by chance alone, that person is likely committing a Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.

Now, I’m not entirely sure if this is the best fallacy to use, but basically it’s based around the idea that given a million monkeys and an infinite amount of time, someone will eventually write Shakespeare. Now, if we ignore all of the negative results, and all of the gibberish and only publish once someone writes Shakespeare, it would seem, at times, as if a monkey left to a certain type of typewriter is more inclined to write Shakespeare.

Don’t get me wrong though, science is explicitly built around the idea that these points would be made public and then eventually proven false by repeated experiments by other individuals. However, with the modern media hyping everything the moment it is published and an overconfidence on anything that is “science” or “published” we have a big problem on our hands.

Yes, evolution is a fact, that’s been around long enough and there is no credible theory that challenges it that I’m willing to say that. In the same sense that I am wiling to say that Maxwell’s Laws are facts and the like.

However, 90% of the new science you keep hearing about… Is probably wrong. Especially psychology and medical science has this flaw (with the sheer number of papers and the need to publish or perish, how could it not.) Yet, we keep going back to that trough. It was published in a peer-reviewed journal, so it must be true, right? The media hypes that red wine is good for you, bad for you, indifferent…

Here’s my theory on this whole matter, not peer-reviewed or published, but at least a functional heuristic. Give it 20 years, or 40 years. Let people challenge the results and see if they actually apply. I wish we could teach people how science (and to be honest any knowledge development) really works. You have an idea, it seems to work for you. You try to figure out why and reproduce it so you can continue to enjoy the benefits. You develop something that seems to work and is reproducable, then you tell people and they try it out.

And 9 times out of 10 they discover that you weren’t quite right.

However, if the idea continues to generate positive results for you, you ignore them and keep using it. If they are right and it starts to fail, you go back and you try again.

To believe that new science is right simply because it’s published is to be as dogmatic as to believe the a religious book is correct simply because someone told you so. Journals (even good journals) are not always right.

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