Tag: Lamp Post Drunk

We’ve all been amused by the lawn ornament of the well dressed gentleman who had a little too much fun. Today, the humorous image is used to illustrate “the streetlight effect” in statistics and philosophy, a type of observational bias where people only look for whatever they are searching by looking where it is easiest.
The story goes: A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, “this is where the light is.”