I know quite a few people in sunk-cost fallacy relationships.
This gotta be the most common, I try not to use the cost as a reason to keep being dumb, but my pride instead.
“Yes I invested $2000 into this beater that still doesn’t run, I wanted to do that because I like its style okay?”
fundamental attribution fallacy. What we do is because of complex situation and circumstances, what they do is because it’s them
The assumption that, for any historical event, we have access to enough information to definitively identify the cause. This manifests in two forms:
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In criminal trials, we assume that the most likely suspect is definitely guilty. If there are nine possible suspects, and one is twice as likely as the others to have committed the crime, that’s considered proof of guilt—but it’s still four times as likely to have been one of the other eight.
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In conspiracy theories, if there’s a similar situation where there are nine possible causes for a historical event, an official investigation may declare one of them the most likely—which can be true in spite of the fact that it’s still probably wrong. But conspiracy theorists, instead of accepting that that’s the best that can be done, take the improbability of the investigation’s explanation as proof that the real cause was suppressed.
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I don’t know if it’s a fallacy, but way too many people use the word “theory” to describe a hypothesis.
Also, mistaking synchronicity for causation.
The lay usage of theory has the same meaning as hypothesis. So outside of a scientific context they are using it correctly.
The problem is when they use the lay definition of theory to dismiss a scientific theory.
The one I see people make almost constantly, is the Appeal to Probability. I myself do it frequently. Sometimes it’s just impractical not to.
You must be fun at parties.
That’s another good example! 🤣😉
I don’t know about the name it could have, but one thing that bothers me constantly are poorly presented statistics. Specially things coming from not giving detailed information about how they found the people or what was the real phrasing of the question.
Or when the y axis goes from 6125 to 9000. Totally not looking at you, the graph shown for stock market variation in the LIBF level 3 qualification study text.
No true scottsman and false dichotomies come up all the time.
I was just barely telling someone they were using a false dichotomy to pretend that the prison situation in the US is a choice between putting innocent people on death row vs actually arresting and prosecuting rich people like they do poor people.
OBVIOUSLY, there should be a HUGE area between those two extremes, yet idiots constantly pretend that asking for change can only be a choice between one or the other.
This happens everywhere in politics on all topics. Some political parties’ entire campaign strategies are to leverage nice sounding logical fallacies.
One that gets just about everybody, including me, is the Availability Heuristic. That’s estimating the prevalence of something based on how easy it is to remember examples of it. Like, for instance, crime. It’s hard to compare the number of criminal acts to the size of the population to get a true picture of how prevalent crime is. It takes a lot of mental effort, so our brains just estimate it based on the number of incidents we’ve heard of using the heuristic that something must be more common if we can recall more examples of it.
That’s why Americans in general think that violent crime is exploding, despite it actually being way down over past decades. The 24-hour news channels fill airtime and the Internet brings us the aggregated crimes of a whole nation, so it’s easy to remember lots of instances. Meanwhile, we don’t worry about heart disease, it doesn’t feel prevalent by comparison, because it doesn’t make the news, and we don’t have easy recall of all the heart attack deaths every day.
I reddit too, I often found more open ended questions on NoStupidQuestions when they would have belonged better elsewhere.
Yeah…like half the post here are like that. What’s the point of different communities if they don’t have themes?
AskLemmy is currently censoring and deleting posts. New accounts are not allowed to post there. The post gets removed immediately.
Use a different asklemmy community then, or make one. But NoStupidQuestions is not for this type of question
The fallacy fallacy
Just because an argument contains a logical fallacy doesn’t mean the argument is necessarily incorrect.
An example:
Person A: This food is better for you because it’s all natural
Person B: appeal to nature, therefore you’re wrong and it’s not better for you
The food may well be much better for you but person B has assumed that the opposite is true because person A has used a logical fallacy and has themselves fallen into a logical fallacy.
It’s still detrimental to the conclusion to use a fallacious/invalid argument, as it will not convince people of the conclusion, even if it happens to be correct for a separate reason - in which case you should say that reason, not the fallacious one.
You mean conclusion. A correct conclusion can be arrived at via fallacy, and the argument is fallacious but the conclusion may or may not be correct.
Not a logical fallacy in itself, but related: the principle of charity
In philosophy and rhetoric, the principle of charity or charitable interpretation requires interpreting a speaker’s statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation.
People typically do the opposite, assuming the worst possible interpretation of others’ arguments. I wish this principle was taught in schools.
Also known as a steelman, in contrast to a strawman.
Correlation taken as Causation has to be the top one:
- Study finds link between depression and video games -> video games cause depression
- Study finds link between homosexuality and suicide -> homosexuality damages the brain
Second would be misjudging proportions:
- Working out burns calories, so going for a 30 minute run (burning 140 kcal above resting rate) will compensate for the chocolate (350 kcal) I just ate. Shit, I deserve an extra one because it was cols outside.
- Vaccines have a 0.1% chance of bad side effects, so I’d rather risk my child having a 5% chance of getting crippled from disease.
