Everyone knows the Titanic sank in April 1912, and if they didn’t they were reminded only a few years ago at its centennial. Less well known, for good reason, is the novel Futility, written by Morgan Robertson in 1898 years before Titanic had even been conceived. Robertson’s book includes the largest vessel ever constructed and he even offered it the name “Titan.” And much like the real Titanic, Titan carries only about half the lifeboats necessary for all the souls onboard and even strikes an iceberg in the Atlantic closing in on Newfoundland.

The physical descriptions of the ship in the novel were eerily close to what Titanic would eventually become; including a capacity for 3,000 passengers and crew, the configuration of the masts and even the propellers. To some, Robertson was a visionary if not a prophet. The legend survives to this day because of those similarities.

It is not well-known beyond the committed because the similarities end there. And even the seeming connections are not all that fantastic to begin with; in 1898 large ships were attaining that configuration and size, Robertson merely imagined what the next steps might be. Further, the route through the North Atlantic was just common and icebergs a quite familiar hazard especially at night (both Titan and Titanic met their fate around midnight).

Thinking the novel some kind of wizardry on the part of Morgan Robertson is an example of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. In this specific case, observation has proved that view correct as Robertson does not ever again appear in the same visionary capacity.

The name of the fallacy is reportedly traced to epidemiologist Dr. Seymour Grufferman in debunking cancer clusters. There are various versions of the story, but one of the earliest appeared in a newspaper in Arizona in October 1982:

I once read a story of an army sharpshooter who visited a small town. He was amazed to find targets drawn on trees, walls, fences and barns. Even more fascinating was the fact that each target had a bullet hole in the exact center of its bull’s eye.

Inquiring about this, he had the honor of meeting the remarkable marksman. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire career,” said the Army man. “It’s incredible!

  How did you do it?” 

 “Easy as pie,” replied the local rifleman. “I shoot first and draw the circles afterwards.”

Other versions, applied with Texas as the location, tell of some unknown gunman spraying the side of a barn with shotgun blasts and then drawing a bull’s eye around the greatest cluster, declaring himself a sharpshooter. In terms of statistics or even just scientific observation, the idea is the observer only taking account those data points that “fit” a predetermined narrative while ignoring or discarding all the misses (usually as “random”).

Janet Yellen this morning testified before Congress with her best shotgun: