The fallacy I chose is the texas sharpshooter. I think this fallacy is similar to the confirmation bias and belief bias we learned about earlier. The texas sharpshooter is the tendency for people to find and select evidence that proves and supports their existing beliefs, and ignore evidence that contradicts their beliefs. For example, some politicians want to argue that their policies are reducing crime rates in their cities. They only provide data that there is a decrease in crime in some specific communities, and ignore any data from other communities where crime is not decreasing or even increasing.
The image below shows the shooter selectively painting targets around the bullets he has already shot, rather than aiming at specific targets.
One thought on “Xinlin Luo Conversation 7”
A texas sharpshooter, a writer deliberately selects the part that favors his own point of view from a large amount of evidence and discards the rest of the evidence that is not good for him. Just like some unqualified researchers nowadays, when they have done many experiments, for the sake of reputation, they can only select the experimental results that conform to their own views and publicize them.