Texas Sharpshooter
Drawing a target around wherever the bullets landed.
"Define success after you see the result. Stunning track record."
What is Texas Sharpshooter? Drawing a target around wherever the bullets landed. Post-hoc narratives that look like predictive insight.
Selecting the markets where a strategy worked; ignoring the rest.
Post-hoc narratives that look like predictive insight.
A consultant shows you that the 11 companies in their portfolio all outperform the S&P. Honestly:
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The full taxonomy entry
Every concept in the Atlas uses the same structure — so Texas Sharpshooter can be compared, recombined, and cited like an element on a periodic table.
- Business
- Leadership
- Government
- Healthcare
- Education
- Sales
- Marketing
- AI
- Negotiation
- Media
- Public Policy
- Relationships
- Where in our org would Texas Sharpshooter most often show up unnoticed?
- Which metric, ritual, or contract clause quietly rewards Texas Sharpshooter?
- If we removed every payoff for Texas Sharpshooter, what behavior would replace it?
- Who benefits when Texas Sharpshooter persists — and who pays the cost?
- People defend the status quo using the language of texas sharpshooter.
- Decisions cluster around the easiest narrative rather than the strongest evidence.
- New data changes the slide deck but not the decision.
- Anyone naming the pattern is treated as the problem.
Every Atlas entry is a node in a knowledge graph. See the related rail below to follow the connections.
See Texas Sharpshooter through this lens
Each layer of the Incentives OS reframes this concept with its own thinkers, vocabulary, and diagnostic question.
Do you actually know Texas Sharpshooter?
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Which best describes Texas Sharpshooter?
Worked example, counter-example & concept map
On-demand AI analysis grounded in the Lab's research. Cached on your device after first run.
When you encounter Texas Sharpshooter, your prefrontal cortex has to do extra work to override the automatic response — and that override budget is finite.
Executive control, planning, impulse override, working memory, System 2. First thing to go offline under stress, fatigue, or low blood sugar. Why your 4pm decisions are worse than your 9am ones.
See Prefrontal in the Brain Atlas →Picked for you, from the Atlas
Ranked by shared learning paths, overlapping chips, and what you've saved.
A single story used as proof of a general claim.
n=1 generalized to n=everyone.
Quoting only the studies that support the position.
Selecting only the data that supports the conclusion.
Sweeping conclusions from a small sample.
Generalizing from winners while ignoring identical losers.
Send the card, not just the link
A pre-rendered social card with the title, eyebrow, and URL. Copy the link, post it anywhere, or download the SVG for slides.
More definitions to follow
Every term in the Atlas connects to a dozen others. Pick any of these and see where it takes you.
Curated highlight reels make ordinary lives feel insufficient.
Seeing every problem through the lens of one's profession.
Systematic testing of model quality, safety, and capability.
Experts believe news articles outside their field despite knowing their own field is misreported.
One party has more or better information than another.
Treating the measure as the goal it was meant to approximate.
Worst-cases assumed as base-cases because they 'feel responsible.'
Output amplifies input — virtuous or vicious cycle.
A developmental model of human value systems (vMemes) emerging in response to life conditions.
Actions have effects that were not planned or anticipated.
What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating.
Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.