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"Emacs -> Cares, therefore Cares -> Emacs" is a form of abductive reasoning. It's only a logical fallacy if you treat it as though logic guaranteed the inferenc
by deong 9y ago
"Emacs -> Cares, therefore Cares -> Emacs" is a form of abductive reasoning. It's only a logical fallacy if you treat it as though logic guaranteed the inference was true. If you treat it as, e.g., input helping to form priors in a Bayesian model, it can be useful information.
Let's say you have 100 programmers. 20 of them "care". Of the 100, 5 use emacs. P(emacs) = 0.05. If all emacs users care, then P(emacs|care) = 0.25. If I wanted to model this phenomenon, I shouldn't ignore the correlation just because it's not perfectly causal.
- hacking_again 9y agoOr in plain English, if you care then there's a greater chance you'll be using Emacs. The fallacy if any is assuming likeliness implies implication. This is commonly known as stereotyping, but it's perhaps more clearly described as generalizing a group stereotype to the entire group.
- bJGVygG7MQVF8c 9y ago#problematic (and, incidentally, incorrect) mansplaining (regardless of your actual self-reported gender) "stereotyping" is a floating signifier, and arguably in common usage doesn't merely signify hasty generalization.