“Texas Sharpshooter Fallacies” produce bad science data

Robert J. Marks, author with design theorist William Dembski and Winston Ewert of Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics talks with Gary Smith, author The AI Delusion, about how, in general, based data is produced
Smith: Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy # 1 is that I’m going to prove what a great shot I am and so I stand outside a barn and then I go and paint a thousand targets on the barn and I fire my gun and what do you know, I am lucky, I hit a target. And then I go and erase all the other targets and I say, look, I hit the target. And, of course, it’s meaningless, because, with so many targets, I’m bound to hit something… So the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy #1 is reporting lots and lots of different theories and reporting the one that seems confirmed by the data and not telling anybody that you tested thousands of other theories.
“Can AI Combat Misleading Medical Research?” at Mind Matters News
https://episodes.castos.com/mindmatters/Mind-Matters-035-Gary-Smith.mp3
That sounds like so many theories about the origin of the human brain.
Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana
Michael J. Behe's Blog
- Michael J. Behe's profile
- 219 followers
