Yeah, I guess the real world is tolerant of them – otherwise we wouldn’t call them fallacies :) If we’re to get closer to the truth though, we must be intoleran

Yeah, I guess the real world is tolerant of them – otherwise we wouldn’t call them fallacies :) If we’re to get closer to the truth though, we must be intolerant of them (but not each other). I think it also depends on precisely what statement you’re trying to prove. In the jQuery example you have to get really specific, because just talking about the best can be pretty vague. There are many examples of best where merely pointing to the popularity of jQuery is a logical fallacy, and perhaps some where it isn’t (e.g. the breadth of documentation making development easier). This is really a different class of problem to something more abstract such as the belief in alien civilisations, where the fallacy is more clear cut. The currency example is a slightly different case though, because it’s the belief in the currency itself that creates the currency. So the statement everyone should replace their USD with Bitcoin is undermined by the overwhelming depth and breadth of belief in USD (misplaced or not). So I don’t think it counts as a logical fallacy, because it goes beyond merely trying to leverage the majority opinion on the subject; the beliefs themselves are absolutely instrumental in driving the relative utility of USD and Bitcoin.