Quotes About Fallacy

I hadn't heard such a ridiculous piece of sophistry since the days when the old shaykh who lived in a box in our alley in Algiers tried to prove that the entire Earth was flat because the city of Mecca was flat. Which it isn't.

I can prove anything by statistics except the truth.

people live and die by nonsense. It's not what is so much as what people think is.

How dangerous can false reasoning prove!

Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.

All sweeping assertions are erroneous.

As it turns out, what looks like science sometimes is not.

It's so easy for us to misperceive and see the things in others that we want to see. And, when we're wrong, and often we're dead wrong, we miss the truth.

It is a very recent disease to mistake the unobserved for the nonexistent; but some are plagued with the worse disease of mistaking the unobserved for the unobservable.

Increasingly, data can only truly deliver via negativa–style knowledge—it can be effectively used to debunk, not confirm.

The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories. Certainly

We can get closer to the truth by negative instances, not by verification! It

Author discussed what he calls the narrative fallacy. This refers to our limited ability to look at a sequence of facts without weaving an explanation into them.

The problem is that we humans are prone to the availability heuristic, by which the salient is mistaken for the statistical, and the conspicuous and emotional effect of an event makes us think it is occurring more regularly than in reality. This helps us to be prudent and careful in daily life, forcing us to add an extra layer of protection, but

The more we try to turn history into anything other than an enumeration of accounts to be enjoyed with minimal theorizing, the more we get into trouble. Are we so plagued with the narrative fallacy?†

The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories.

As much as it is ingrained in our habits and conventional wisdom, confirmation can be a dangerous error.

If you believe that witnessing an additional white swan will bring confirmation that there are no black swans, then you should also accept the statement, on purely logical grounds, that the sighting of a red Mini Cooper should confirm that there are no black swans.

narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. Explanations

I wonder why people don't realize the simple truism, that is, the fooled by randomness effect: mistaking the merely associative for the causal, that is, if rich countries are educated, immediately inferring that education makes a country rich, without even checking. Epiphenomenon

The fallacy is that what one may need to know in the real world does not necessarily match what one can perceive through intellect: it doesn't mean that details are not relevant, only that those we tend (IYI-style) to believe are important can distract us from more central attributes of the price mechanism.

Are we so plagued with the narrative fallacy?

Mother of all harmful mistakes - mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence.

This does not mean we cannot talk about causes; there are ways to escape the narrative fallacy. How? By making conjectures and running experiments, or as we shall see in Part Two (alas) by making testable predictions. The psychology experiments I am discussing here do so: They suggest a problem, and run a test.