Quotes About Fallacy

I do not expect that the mere fact that I was once an evangelical apologist and now see things differently should itself count as evidence that I must be right. That would be the genetic fallacy. It would be just as erroneous to think that John Rankin must be right in having embraced evangelical Christianity since he had once been an agnostic Unitarian and repudiated it for the Christian faith.

Fallacy of the Talking Killer. The villain wants to kill the hero. He has him cornered at gunpoint. All he has to do is pull the trigger. But he always talks first. He explains the hero's mistakes to him. Jeers. Laughs. And gives the hero time to think his way out of the situation, or be rescued by his buddy. Cf. most James Bond movies.

But what is equally important, and sobering, is how often we fool ourselves. And we fool ourselves not only individually but en masse. The tendency of a group of human beings to quickly come to believe something that its individual members will later see as obviously false is truly amazing. Some of the worst tragedies of the last century happened because well-meaning people fell for easy solutions proposed by bad leaders.

The idea that the odds of an event with a fixed probability increase or decrease depending on recent occurrences of the event is called the gambler's fallacy.

Everything popular is wrong.

Common sense is what tells us the earth is flat.

The introduction of the word 'intuition' by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument.

post hoc ergo propter hoc. In other words, there would be no causal

At the heart of which attitude lies the strange retributive instinct of our time towards the past which suggests that we know ourselves to be better than people in history because we know how they behaved and we know that we would have behaved better. There is a gigantic modern fallacy at work here.

Attaching "produced at Berkeley, Harvard, MIT" to a ridiculous argument immediately makes it cogent to many. That's part of life, but let's not pretend that it's rationality.

Together, creeping determinism and sampling bias lead commonsense explanations to suffer from what is called the post-hoc fallacy.

The result is that we are tempted to infer a cause-and-effect relationship when all we have witnessed is a sequence of events. This is the post-hoc fallacy.

If we carry this line of argument to its logical conclusion, the meaning of life consists of the flaws in one's conceptions and what one does about them. Life can be seen as a fertile fallacy.

I'm always identifying some fallacy in my own life. I'm sort of making fun of myself by exploring and unpacking just why I'm sort of automatically thrown to be a certain way.

The majority in Plessy v. Ferguson asserted that separation and equality were wholly separate ideas. "We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon

1. The first psychological fallacy is the tendency to overvalue wagers involving a low probability of a high gain and to undervalue wagers involving a relatively high probability of low gain. The best examples are the favorites and the long shots at racetracks.

Even research communities of highly intelligent and well-meaning individuals can fall prey to confirmation bias, as IQ is positively correlated with the number of reasons people find to support their own side in an argument

Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.

Anything that involves action, be it war or reasoning, is false; and anything that involves abdication is false too.

Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy.

See, even despite pious statements to the contrary, much of the industrialized world has not yet come to terms with the recognition of the fallacy of what I call the strong man syndrome.

he guessed, totally incorrectly.

The consumption-driven mind-set masquerades as "qualify of life" but eats us from within...But Governments still cling to the neoclassical fallacy that human consumption has no consequences.

All that was speculation, and a man can get carried away by a reasonable theory. Often a man finds a theory that explains things and he builds atop that theory, finding all the right answers...only the basic theory is wrong. But that's the last thing he will want to admit.