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Logical Fallacies and Statistical Anomalies Trick You Into Believing Untrue Things
No, Nicolas Cage isn’t trying to drown you.
Someone posted an interesting statistic the other day: the Baltimore Ravens won their 2001 Super Bowl with a 28-year-old quarterback (Trent Dilfer). Twelve years later, they won again with another 28-year-old quarterback (Joe Flacco). This season, twelve years after the 2013 Super Bowl, they’re playing with a 28-year-old quarterback (Lamar Jackson). What are the odds?
The odds are pretty good, actually. As you can see in the chart above, the median age of Super Bowl winning quarterbacks is 29.5, and the average is 30.6. The median value tells us that half of the quarterbacks who won a Super Bowl were in their 20s. The others were in their 30s, with the exception of Tom Brady, who won two championships in his 40s. (If anything, there’s also a bias here where several quarterbacks won multiple championships, so the ages in the data are not independent.)
This meme about Baltimore is a prime example of the “Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy,” where our brains paint a target around random clusters in data and claim we hit a…