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Distrust would be right. The fallacy was that people consider presence of statistical evidence as a negative sign. Not realizing its possible to lie without st
by avodonosov 2y ago
Distrust would be right.
The fallacy was that people consider presence of statistical evidence as a negative sign. Not realizing its possible to lie without statistics as well.
Lets imagine a book "100 ways to harm your health with medicine", and a sick person choosing between magic and medicine: "Aha, the book has proven that medicine is harmful, so of course magic".
- fc417fc802 2y agoIndeed that would be the wrong conclusion to jump to. However it isn't how I read the original example. I saw it more as "A is backed by evidence B" rebutted with "I don't trust evidence B because ...". Despite the described tone being poor and the individual obviously horribly ignorant, when assessed from their (apparent) point of view instead of my own that position seems fairly reasonable to me. In other words, not so much "magic instead of medicine" as rejecting the claim that medicine is superior to magic while also declining to hold the view that magic is superior to medicine.
- avodonosov 2y agoWhat you describe can be called healthy critical thinking. The case I mentioned was different, I just described it poorly due to my limited English profficiency and typing on mobile, so you and others suspect the opponent meant reasonable doubts. Anyways, logical fallacies are ubiquitous. And of the level of the simplest Aristotelian logic, not even requiring first order logic. An automated tool capturing may probably be useful. Arguments similar to "bananas are yellow, so if I see something yellow that's a banana" are quite often in politics. The paper cites some previous studies of fallacies in an online forum and in argumentative essays.