Submitted 8 months ago by the_great_Cornholio@lemmy.world to [deleted]
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.
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.
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.
Correlation taken as Causation has to be the top one:
Second would be misjudging proportions:
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?"
!asklemmy@lemmy.world
rtxn@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I don’t know if it’s a fallacy, but way too many people use the word “theory” to describe a hypothesis.
snooggums@midwest.social 8 months ago
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.