History Main / SharpshooterFallacy

* In ''VideoGame/PlanescapeTorment'', Morte mentions the "Rule of Three", a popular underlying principle of the Multiverse. He then criticises it and explains that if you ascribe importance to any number, you're bound to find evidence for it.

!!! Examples:

* Beautifully illustrated in the ''PrincipiaDiscordia'' with the [[UsefulNotes/{{Discordia}} Discordian]] Law of Fives: "All things happen in fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to five."

* ''TheIlluminatusTrilogy'', being heavily influenced by [[UsefulNotes/{{Discordia}} Discordianism]], further deconstructs this. After playing up the significance of the Law of Fives throughout the book, Hagbard Celine then proceeds to demolish it by explaining it as an example of this trope, reinforced by intellectual pareidolia. He goes even further, explaining how even the number five is merely an accident of nature: "If humans were born with six fingers instead of five, we'd be talking about a 'Law of Sixes'".

* Malcolm Gladwell's notion of the "tipping point"; tipping points are points after which change is perceived to have been inevitable, but since they are only recognisable as such after the fact, you can't predict them in advance, so all they're good for is making the person talking about them look smart. (Tipping points ''are'' observable in natural phenomena; for example, the boiling point of water at sea level is 100C, so you can predict that when water gets to that temperature at sea level, it will boil. Anything more complicated than that and you're getting involved in probability theory.)

* In the lead-up to the 2012 American Presidential election, there was much to do that a mathematician had found an algorithm that predicted the winner of every Presidential election for the past 50 years. Being on this page, obviously he took the raw data and simply found one that fit it.

* In ''{{Planescape: Torment}}'', Morte mentions the "Rule of Three", a popular underlying principle of the Multiverse. He then criticises it and explains that if you ascribe importance to any number, you're bound to find evidence for it.

* In ''{{Planescape: Torment}}'', Morte mentions the "Rule of Three", a popular underlying principle of the Multiverse. He then criticises it and explains that if you ascribe importance to any number, you're bound to find evidence for it.

* ''TheIlluminatusTrilogy'', being heavily influenced by [[UsefulNotes/{{Discordia}} Discordianism]], further deconstructs this. After playing up the significance of the Law of Fives throughout the book, Hagbard Celine then proceeds to demolish it by explaining it as an example of this trope, reinforced by intellectual pareidolia. He goes even further, explaining how even the number five is merely an accident of nature: "If humans were born with six fingers instead of five, we'd be talking about a 'Law of Sixes'".

:: A way of fiddling [[LiesDamnedLiesAndStatistics statistics]] where you don't establish the conditions until after you've "proved" them. The prototypical example is of a person shooting a gun at a wall, then painting a target around the bullet-hole, and claiming to have scored a bullseye.

:: Karl Popper summed up this fallacy as applied to science with "A theory that explains everything, explains nothing". Basically, if any possible outcome could be interpreted as supporting the theory then it is useless. Which is the pretty much the same thing as [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifability the concept of falsifiability]].

:: A way of fiddling statistics where you don't establish the conditions until after you've "proved" them. The prototypical example is of a person shooting a gun at a wall, then painting a target around the bullet-hole, and claiming to have scored a bullseye.

** ''John Safran vs God'' put this exact argument against the Bible Code to the test by feeding the entirety of Music/VanillaIce's back catalogue (song lyrics and liner notes) into the decoder; even "Ice Ice Baby" is able to turn up 9/11 "predictions."

** ''John Safran vs God'' put this exact argument against the Bible Code to the test by feeding the entirety of VanillaIce's back catalogue (song lyrics and liner notes) into the decoder; even "Ice Ice Baby" is able to turn up 9/11 "predictions."

* Beatifully illustrated in the ''PrincipiaDiscordia'' with the [[UsefulNotes/{{Discordia}} Discordian]] Law of Fives: "All things happen in fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to five."
* TheIlluminatusTrilogy, being heavily influenced by [[UsefulNotes/{{Discordia}} Discordianism]], further deconstructs this. After playing up the significance of the Law of Fives throughout the book, Hagbard Celine then proceeds to demolish it by explaining it as an example of this trope, reinforced by intellectual pareidolia. He goes even further, explaining how even the number five is merely an accident of nature: "If humans were born with six fingers instead of five, we'd be talking about a 'Law of Sixes'".

* Beatifully illustrated in the ''PrincipiaDiscordia'' with the [[{{Discordia}} Discordian]] Law of Fives: "All things happen in fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to five."
* TheIlluminatusTrilogy, being heavily influenced by [[{{Discordia}} Discordianism]], further deconstructs this. After playing up the significance of the Law of Fives throughout the book, Hagbard Celine then proceeds to demolish it by explaining it as an example of this trope, reinforced by intellectual pareidolia. He goes even further, explaining how even the number five is merely an accident of nature: "If humans were born with six fingers instead of five, we'd be talking about a 'Law of Sixes'".

* Beatifully illustrated in the ''PrincipiaDiscordia'' with the [[{{Discordianism}} Discordian]] Law of Fives: "All things happen in fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to five."
* TheIlluminatusTrilogy, being heavily influenced by {{Discordianism}}, further deconstructs this. After playing up the significance of the Law of Fives throughout the book, Hagbard Celine then proceeds to demolish it by explaining it as an example of this trope, reinforced by intellectual pareidolia. He goes even further, explaining how even the number five is merely an accident of nature: "If humans were born with six fingers instead of five, we'd be talking about a 'Law of Sixes'".

* Beatifully illustrated in the ''PrincipiaDiscordia'' with the [[Discordianism Discordian]] Law of Fives: "All things happen in fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to five."

* Basically, the film TheNumber23 runs on this. Once you start looking for 23 (or any other number) in creative enough ways, you'll see it everywhere.
** This is spoofed by [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR1_epbmI2g The Number 24]].

** This particular case was specifically shot down by a skeptic in a History Channel documentary about such Bible Codes. To prove that such a "spectacularly rare occurrence" actually was more likely than people were willing to admit, he applied the principles for finding codes to ''MobyDick'', looking for "predictions" of the assassination of JFK. He found quite a few. As with the metaphor of monkeys with typewriters, any sufficiently long stream of data, if looked over using enough different formulas, will produce words or phrases that correlate to some kind of event that occurred after that book was written.

* Likewise, all claims of various people's names being secret encodings of the {{Number of the Beast}}, 666. There are a lot of ways you can assign numbers to letters or words -- try enough of them, and you can probably make "666" somehow.

* Basically, the film TheNumber23 runs on this. Once you start looking for 23 in creative enough ways, you'll see it everywhere.

* Likewise, all claims of various people's names being secret encodings of the {{Number of the Beast}}, 666. There are a lot of ways you can assign numbers to letters or words -- try enough of them, and you can probably make "666" somehow.

:: Karl Popper summed up this fallacy as applied to science with "A theory that explains everything, explains nothing". Basically, if any possible outcome could be interpreted as supporting the theory then it is useless. Which is the pretty much the same thing as [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifability the concept of falsifability]].