Quotes About Fallacy

What passes for optimism is most often the effect of an intellectual error.

if the two of you are alone, walk away. If you have an audience, consider throwing the fallacy back at your opponent. "I see. Purple is a fruit. So, since your skin is tan, that makes you a pair of khakis.

Did you ever notice that when a politician does get an idea he usually gets it all wrong.

If you believe these polls, you're making a mistake.

If you can pay enough people to buy your .99 ebook and review it positively, and crack one of Amazon's bestseller lists, readers are going to check it out. Especially at a low price point like .99. Customers are suckers for the fallacy that the cream rises to the top.

Rarely have so many people been so wrong about so much.

To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.

I would say that you have fallen into the commonest fallacy of all in dealing with social and economic subjects—the 'devil theory.' [...] You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity. [...] You think banders are scoundrels. They are not. Nor are company officials, nor patrons, nor the governing classes back on earth. Men are constrained by necessity and build up rationalizations to account for their acts.

value,' has two factors for a human being: first, what he can do with a thing, its use to him . . . and second, what he must do to get it, its cost to him. There is an old song which asserts 'the best things in life are free.' Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century;

Even Aristotle, despite the abuse he has suffered in these pages, had enough common sense to point out, once, that I see always contains fallacy; we should say I have seen. Time always elapses between the impact of energy on the eye and the creation of an image (and associated name and ideas) in the brain, which explains why three eyewitnesses to a hit-and-run such as we postulate here may report, not just the blue Ford of the first speaker, but a blue VW or maybe even a green Toyota.

That technology has canceled geography contains just enough merit to be called a plausible fallacy

We see people not as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.

Generally, there is the fallacy that dividends are free money, by which I mean that many investors strictly buy dividend stocks to get the dividend income or bonus, says Dejan Ilijevski, investment advisor and president at Sabela Capital Markets in Munster, Indiana. Rather a dividend is simply a transfer of wealth from the company's books to the shareholder.

Dictators are rulers who always look good until the last ten minutes.

Perhaps the most serious objection is what Tetlock calls the "wrong-side-of-maybe fallacy," the risk of being charged with "failure" when an event doesn't happen even when the intelligence estimate claimed there was only a 70 percent chance that it would. When it comes to likelihood, we tend to conflate maybe with sure thing.87

Small aberrations in doctrinal teaching can lead to large and evil falsehoods.

Most people feel they lack the intelligence to find the right way for them, but this is merely misunderstanding. Intelligence has nothing to do with college degrees or reading books. True intelligence is a willingness to exchange a fallacy for a fact.

Without awareness of common pitfalls such as confirmation bias, positive-outcome bias, and subjective validation, a person trained in logic and fallacy detection is easily deceived into thinking that he or she has acquired invincible armor against assaults of unreason. Expressions like post hoc ergo propter hoc and false cause, should be informed by knowledge of evolution and how the brain works to jump to conclusions about causal connections.

When presented with this evidence, believers in the "hot hand" are likely to reject it because they "know better" from experience.

It was only later that he recognised the folly he had fallen into, a human trait he had long observed: that merely because one wishes to believe in a thing, it does not follow that it is true.

A false conclusion once arrived at and widely accepted is not easily dislodged and the less it is understood the more tenaciously it is held.

Obvious is the most dangerous word in mathematics.