if you find yourself talking to someone who straw mans so hard that they're going to be picking
chaff out of their hair for a week it would be good to be able to point at what exactly it is
that's making meaningful discussion impossible i will also put a link to your website which has
pages entitled your logical fallacy is which also has more detailed explanations let's go fallacy
of composition if it's true of the parts then it's true of the whole if there are three great players
on my hockey team then my hockey team must also be great right and the opposite fallacy of division
if it's true of the whole then it must be true of the parts if my flat is about half the size
of your flat then it follows logically that my doors must be half the size of your doors the
gambler's fallacy is the idea that streaks of good luck or bad luck exist and are not just random
noise it's been read six times in a row it's on a streak too quickly or who are you to talk if your
sister who does no exercise says you should do 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of
vigorous exercise a week to be healthy it is the two quickly fallacy to say i'll do it when you do
who are you to lecture me about what exercise i should be doing her not doing exercise says
nothing about whether or not you should do it strawman willfully misrepresenting an argument
often in a massively hyperbolic fashion we should cut down on our use of fossil fuels
oh so you want to ban all cars and make 80 year olds with suitcases run around on bicycles do you
no ad hominem you're evil an evil witch burn the witch and don't listen to the witch's opinions
they're the devil's words sometimes people are obviously biased or subjective and so you should
treat their arguments with care but it's generally better form to attack the argument rather than the
person somewhat related to this is the genetic fallacy which is assuming that an argument is
automatically wrong because of its source even a stopped clock is right twice a day falicious
appeal to authority sometimes it's appropriate to look at what experts think on a topic but
fallacious appeals to authority bring in someone who's an expert in an entirely unrelated field
and expect you to treat them as an expert in this field being an expert in particle physics doesn't
mean you'll automatically have sensible opinions on say pig husbandry or vice versa red herring a
fallacy of distraction well they might have stolen the puppy your honor but look how sad they are to
be in court red herrings may seem plausible but are ultimately irrelevant in our example a person
being sad because they have been made to come to court is not relevant to whether or not they
actually stole a puppy that particular red herring is also an example of appeal to emotion appeals to
emotion attempt to distract you by making you feel bad for the other person so why should we hire you
for this job because if you don't hire me then i'll be out on the street and i'll have to live
in a cardboard box you don't want to make me live in a cardboard box do you appeal to popularity or
bandwagon five million people can't be wrong appeal to tradition people have been doing this
for thousands of years so it must be right appeal to nature oh don't trust medicine or science it's
full of chemicals which are bad for you here take this belladonna it's very natural appeal
to ignorance if you can't prove it false it must be true or vice versa you can't prove that ghosts
don't exist therefore they must exist well you can't prove that ghosts do exist so therefore
they clearly don't both of these are appeals to ignorance begging the question assuming to be true
a premise that you are trying to prove zog the great is infallible because in the big book of zog
the great it says that he's infallible and we know that the text is infallible because it was written
by zog who is infallible because it says so in the book which was written by someone who says
equivocation is using one word to mean multiple things and thus drawing incorrect conclusions
often on purpose any law can be repealed by the proper authority the law of gravity is a law
therefore the law of gravity can be repealed which conflates law in the legal sense and law
in the scientific sense and makes you look like a bit of an egypt false dichotomy or black or white
either you agree with everything i say or you're an evil baby eater there is no middle ground
sort of opposite to the black and white fallacy is the middle ground fallacy which says if some
people think two plus two is four and some people think two plus two is five then clearly the answer
lies somewhere in the middle no decision point fallacy or the sororities paradox the decision
point fallacy says because there is a continuum it means we can't distinguish between things but
just because the boundaries between things are a bit blurry doesn't mean we can't tell one thing
from another i know that a horse is a mammal and a frog is an amphibian even though frogs lay eggs
and so do some mammals duck build classify what you gonna do the slippery slope fallacy is the
assertion that one step will inevitably lead to another which will inevitably lead to another
which will inevitably lead to doom if you get a credit card then you will overspend and you
will not be able to make your payments and then you will definitely end up living on the street
in a cardboard box if you can stop at any of the steps then it's a fallacy hasty generalizations or
anecdotes this is where you draw a general conclusion from a small or biased sample
obvious examples include things like well my aunt smoked 10 cigarettes a day and she lived to 109 so
cigarettes mustn't be bad for you but it's also one of the reasons that self-selective surveys
aren't particularly good for drawing general conclusions about a population faulty analogy
comparing things which aren't actually similar in the way that would be relevant government is
like business since businesses strive to make a profit so should government burden of proof
when you insist that it's incumbent upon the person who disbelieves your claims to provide
proof against them rather than providing proof for them yourself i am a ghost no you're not why
are you saying that prove it then prove me wrong prove i'm not a ghost since you're the one saying
you're a ghost surely it's incumbent upon you to back up this rather extraordinary claim which
you can't because you can't walk through walls and you're not transparent nor remotely scary
i'm a ghost you're really not affirming the consequent is when you say something like
my dog barks when there's an intruder my dog is not barking therefore there's no intruder which if
your premises are in fact correct and there is no way that your dog would not bark when there's an
intruder is fine however my dog barks when there's an intruder my dog is barking therefore there must
be an intruder is not valid i mean dogs bark for all sorts of reasons so unless your premise is
my dog only barks when they're intruders this is not right the opposite of this is
denying the antecedent if it barks then it's a dog it's barking therefore it's a dog great
but if it's not barking then it's not a dog is not valid because maybe it's just a dog that's
you know tired moving the girl posts you make a claim like i can read minds when someone tests
this and you fail the test you then say well i can only read minds which are on the right wavelength
didn't mention that before moving the goal posts false cause correlation is not causation so even
if global temperatures increase while pirate numbers decrease that doesn't mean that pirates
prevent global warming see also the texas sharpshooter where you shoot the side of a
barn and then draw your targets afterwards first you figure out what your conclusion is then you
go looking for data to support it loaded question asking something with an assumption built in that
means the answerer sounds bad no matter what they say when did you stop beating your wife no true
scotsman no scotsman puts sugar on his porridge if you're a scottish man and you put sugar on
your porridge you are not a true scotsman personal incredulity well it's hard for me to believe that
we're all made of billions of atoms and so i'm just not going to and last but by no means least
the fallacy fallacy just because something contains one or more fallacies doesn't mean
that they have reached the wrong conclusion your yoga teacher says i should eat vegetables because
vegetables are healthy but that is a fallacious appeal to authority because yoga teachers are not
dietitians therefore i should eat cake thanks for watching and i hope this was educational
leave a comment if you have a favorite or least favorite fallacy and if you want to give us a
truly ludicrous example thereof i mean i guess you could give us a normal example too but and if you
like videos about critical thinking let me know in the comments and i might make another one all that
remains then is to say thank you to my patrons and tell you to look right if you would like to see
the subscribe link the patreon link or more videos that you might like take care see you next time