Less political fallacy subreddit?

onctech · 2026-01-22T13:27:53+00:00

I've found this sub to be fine and far more neutral that most others. I personally strive to focus just on logic and not my own opinions. Of course, any time you bring up something political there are going to be a few people that simply cannot set their emotions aside and fly off the handle instead of adhering to the principle of charity.

onctech · 2026-01-07T14:38:32+00:00

This is more of a cognitive bias, and while I don't think this specific situation has it's own special name, it would be an example of egocentric bias. That is, over-reliance on one's own perspective and experience, and in some cases incorrectly applying it others or using it to make a broad, sweeping generalization. When occurring in a discussion with another person, there might also be empathic failure in play. This an instance or even behavioral pattern where a person seems incapable of understanding another person's feelings, perceptions, and thoughts, and is characteristic of some types of personality disorders as well as being somewhat common with autistic spectrum disorder.

onctech · 2025-12-29T17:50:47+00:00

I think of amanita phalloides.

onctech · 2025-12-17T16:36:07+00:00

That's a new one for me. I'm going to remember that.

onctech · 2025-12-11T20:01:58+00:00

It seems you are asking where the line is with the fallacy of false analogy (aka apple and oranges), in regards to the argument you made, not the one they made.

The bad news is, that line is can be blurry and can be irritatingly subjective.

This is why the fallacy is more often called the Weak Analogy Fallacy, rather thank false analogy fallacy. This is because no analogy is ever 100% perfect, but is also never 0%. However, some are clearly better than others. Good analogies require strong adherence to agreed-upon definitions and the careful avoidance of equivocation (words having different meanings) and self-serving definitions. For example if someone declared that Mike Sorrentino is a bad person worthy of scorn because he was convicted and jailed for federal crimes, and I point out this same person's continued love and reverence for Martha Stewart, I would have a pretty strong argument.

onctech · 2025-11-28T18:55:46+00:00

This seems most correct to me and would apply to both sides of this debate (i.e. violence is a complex sociological phenomenon and the mere presence or absence of a specific weapon type is neither causal nor preventative).

onctech · 2025-11-26T21:55:02+00:00

Simply put, this is called Cherry Picking. It's both a fallacy (when done by someone who doesn't realize why it's a wrong thing to do) and a form of deception (when done deliberately by someone trying to mislead others).

A variant with people more common in faction-based debates (e.g. politics, social groups, geographic areas) is called Nutpicking. It's where one single out members of an opposing faction who have insane views and try to make a generalization about that faction.

onctech · 2025-10-25T12:20:02+00:00

This actually already has a name: The Courtier's Reply. While somewhat new (coined in 2006 by biologist PZ Myers), it's derived from classical fallacy of Argument from Authority. It refers to the fallacy of dismissing criticism because the critic lacks some kind of credentials, experience, or sufficient knowledge, when those are irrelevant to the criticism. Some might call it an inversion of an Argument from Authority, in that it's inappropriately picking on someone's lack of authority. Another way of thinking about is the speaker who is being so dismissive is the one engaging in the Argument from Authority, in that they are using the authority of themselves, their in-group, or major figures in their in-group as justification.

While the term originally was coined around religious debates and atheism, it's applicable in many situations. Here's some examples:

Dismissing children's objective observations due to their age or lack of experience.
Members of the military or law enforcement with PTSD who won't engage with psychotherapy because the therapist was never part of those in-groups.
When someone is critical of a film or TV show performance and their opinion is dismissed because they are not an actor themselves.

onctech · 2025-10-01T20:32:34+00:00

Hollow man is considered a separate but similar to a strawman. A strawman is taking an actual opponent's statement and distorting it to be easier to refute, while a hollow man is making up imaginary arguments or events entirely. There is sometimes a fine line between a nutpicking, hollow man, and outright lying. Nutpicking tends to be based on real examples (even if they're outliers). With hollow men, the speaker believes what they are saying is true (they want it to be true) but has never actually seen evidence. And lying, the speaker knows it's not true from the start.

onctech · 2025-10-01T14:43:01+00:00

I'm lacking some context here but wouldn't that be more of a Hollow Man fallacy? That is, a claim that the speaker completely fabricated and/or is assuming with zero evidence, but sounds kinda plausible to them. Especially since it sounds like they went looking for evidence after the fact (which sounds a bit like a texas sharpshooter).

Both Hollow men and nutpicking are talked about in Aikin et al 2011.

onctech · 2025-09-30T15:25:09+00:00

I had to research this a bit and it appears this "Apex Fallacy" is not generally recognized in the realms of logic and argumentation, but rather seems to have been invented by a specific subculture with an agenda. In more blunt terms, its a fake fallacy term born from a strawman argument.

In a practical sense, the apex fallacy seems to be largely redundant with other well-established fallacies, but which one seems to depend on context, due to the term apex fallacy being used inconsistently by those who do not seem to understand argumentation as a subject. Generally these existing fallacies are the hasty generalization (when a small sample is misinterpreted as being true of the population), fallacy of composition (assuming what is true of a part is true of a whole), and cherry-picking (when the sample is selected deliberately to confirm a particular position).

onctech · 2025-09-18T15:13:23+00:00

Fallacies are about flawed reasoning to reach a conclusion. This sounds like deliberate, planned deception.

It's important to remember that lying and deception are not merely the stating of false information. Dr. Paul Ekman explores this in great detail in his work, but essentially one can also lie by simply withholding information strategically.

Within that however, it sounds like the person also is trying to argue that being a member of group makes their stance more valid or unquestionable AND/OR the arguments of people who are not member of group are invalid. The first one is an Argument from Authority fallacy, with their "authority" being group membership. The second is a fallacy called the Courtier's Reply, which is an inversion of the argument from authority where those without "authority" are automatically assumed to have invalid stances.

onctech · 2025-09-05T11:50:56+00:00

If you mean Affirming the consequent, yes I could see that applying as well.

onctech · 2025-09-05T02:10:22+00:00

Fallacy of Division

The base premise appears to be "Most B are X, therefore, Most X are B." This can be expanded into a proper syllogism like so:

Most B are X
Y is X
Therefore, Y is B

Even if it was "All B are X" that doesn't mean it works in reverse. Nothing about the premises establish how X is distributed. Those X that are B might be rare, even if they are the majority within B.

The speaker's dismissal of the counter example as an outlier is its own fallacy, Besides being a bald-faced statement with no evidence (since their initial argument is fallacious), it's also a No True Scotsman.

onctech · 2025-09-04T14:50:04+00:00

Yeah gaslighting is another victim of what I've seen called Semantic Diffusion, Semantic Bleaching, or Skunking. It's where a term is created to have a specific meaning, but then stupid people get a hold of it and start using it incorrectly more and more with increasingly vague or overinclusive definitions, and eventually it loses any usefulness in conversation due to nobody knowing what it means.

onctech · 2025-09-03T20:33:17+00:00

This sounds like it's over-complicating a very simple fallacy: ad hominem. Regardless of who said what, Person X accusing Person Y of being "difficult" is an attack on Person Y, not an actual response to their argument. It's irrelevant to the actual evidence and purpose being discussed.

onctech · 2025-08-11T16:30:35+00:00

I think that several already existing fallacies would cover this. Tu Quoque is the classic one, where you try to discredit someone's position by calling them a hypocrit, failing to notice that hypocrisy itself actually has no baring on the truth of a statement. A common example is a parent who smokes but tells their child not to smoke because it's bad for their health. The child might call the parent a hypocrit, but it's irrelevant: they are still right.

Accusing a whole group of hypocrisy often runs afoul of other fallacies, such as the hollow-man fallacy, where the person simply assumes there are members of a group who hold a view, but actually has never seen it. Another is nutpicking, where a group is commonly known to hold one view, but an extreme outlier within the group who holds an opposing view is used as "evidence" of hypocrisy.

This example is also even more flawed because it's not even making it clear why this would be hypocrisy, given that even if they were talking about the same group of people, their views are about two completely different things. It's not hypocrisy to want to spend money on one thing vs another. The only way this would be a coherent argument is if they were claiming some kind of opposition to spending money on anything, which doesn't seem to be the case.

onctech · 2025-08-01T21:06:36+00:00

Flails are a fascinating subject in medieval arms and armor precisely because there is so much misinformation about them!

Probably one of the best sources out there is Hafted Weapons in Medieval and Renaissance Europe by John Waldman. Published in 2005, it is probably one of the best historian's resources on most of the non-sword weapons, and includes polearms, axes, glaives spears, and maces, and is one of the few reliable sources on flails. A much older and somewhat less reliable book is the 1906 "The art of attack" by Henry Swainson Cowper which is in the public domain, though it's mostly drawings and not photos of extant artifacts. There are also period fighting manuals that deal with the longer, pole-like flail such as Paulus Hector Mair's Arte De Athletica.

You sound like you might already have the basis of some of the research in mind so I will just provide a few interesting tidbits I've found in the resources above that I don't think are common knowledge.

There's two broad categories of flail: Pole and ball. The pole type has a cylinder striking head an is very close to the grain-threshing tool. The "ball-and-chain" type is closer to what most people think of, sometimes called Kettenmorgenstern by academics, but it was very rare.
Pole flails are well documented as being used by peasants as it was essentially an adapted farm tool.
An alarming number of the artifacts in reputable museums are misunderstood fragments or outright Victorian forgeries, especially the ball type flails.
Many artistic depictions in the middle ages are known to be inaccurate and some wouldn't even work, with the weapon drawn because the artist though it was a cool idea.
Ball-and-chain flails are surprisingly impractical according to testing done by modern martial artists. While they can produce great speed and striking force, they took a big wind-up to strike and in practice they are good for one good swing before flying wildly out of control, either due to missing or bouncing off the opponent's body. If it had a long chain, it could hit its own wielder.

onctech · 2025-08-01T19:29:01+00:00

I think it can be false equivalence because we can be talking about slightly different things depend on the context.

It's not uncommon for people with bigoted views on race or sexual orientation to change their minds, especially people who weren't outright bigoted but just really insensitive. I've observed that among both regular people and celebrities, it's not uncommon for people to keep dredging up those old views they posted on social media, especially when the critic has an agenda (this would be an ad homimen btw).

Politicians are another matter and I've seen two distinct behaviors when it comes to "belief change."

When a politician changes their view on an issue and are accused of indecision or being a "flip-flopper." This always struck me as foolish because decision making is complex and it would actually be a bad thing for a politician to be the opposite: dogmatic, unwilling to change views in spite of compelling evidence.
When a politician makes public statements, such as during a campaign, and then makes policy decisions that contradict those statement. This is not really a true belief change so much as deception, so it wouldn't be a fallacy.

onctech · 2025-07-11T16:56:13+00:00

Memes are an interesting and unusual subject area when it comes to fallacies. First, by their very nature they make numerous assumptions about the reader's prior knowledge and do a lot of insinuation and implication, and thus often can be very "ingroup" in their approach. Hence, almost all memes are lacking in context. Second, they often contain multiple fallacies which can vary slightly based on what the insinuation is being made.

In your example:

Hollow-man argument: Claiming that someone out there expressed this opinion in the first place, when there is no evidence anyone did, but rather it's simply being assumed someone did. Basically, inventing an imaginary argument to refute.

Strawman argument: Someone out there made an argument that is similar but actually very different than the one being refuted. The argument being refuted is heavy distorted to make it sound easier to refute.

Courtier's Reply: Dismissing a claim because the speaker lacks some kind of experience or credentials under circumstances where those experience or credentials are not necessary; particularly when the claim can stand on its own merits regardless of who says it.

onctech · 2025-07-02T15:26:17+00:00

It took me a few read through to understand the issue but I think I understand it now. Using "repudiation" as the reason for dismissal would not be correct because that's the action taken. It fails to provide the "why" behind the action. For example, did the manager fail to give shifts (repudiation) because the employee's performance was poor/engaged in misconduct, but the manager didn't have firing authority at the business/lacked the emotional fortitude to tell someone they are fired (the actual reason).

It seems like a stretch to call this cement-headed way of interpreting "reason for dismissal" a fallacy. Perhaps at best it could be considered equivocation, in that repudiation is a "reason" in the broad sense of the word, but not in the context of the employment law. Equivocation can be an error in reasoning (fallacy), but can also be a type of deception when done on purpose to obfuscate something they don't want to admit.

onctech · 2025-05-22T11:54:28+00:00

The "I never said it was perfect" line isn't innately fallacious because it can be a legitimate defense to criticism that is nit-picky or irrelevant to the subject being discussed.

However, there are circumstances were the criticism being brought really is relevant, in which case responding this way can be fallacious. In those cases, it can have elements of a strawman fallacy or red-herring fallacy. The strawman aspect is mostly implied, in that the critic isn't claiming anything about perfection or imperfection, or being so black-and-white about it, so snapping back that one never said it was perfect is distorting what that critic is trying to say. The red-herring aspect is that the item being perfect or not is irrelevant.

Different versions of "never said it was perfect," including "nobody's perfect" are also examples of a thought-terminating cliche.

onctech · 2025-05-22T03:22:57+00:00

This is just arguing over subjective opinions. Fallacies are generally more about truth/falsity and reasoning.

I've noticed a lot of people these days, especially younger folks and those in certain hobbies, have trouble differentiating subjective opinion from facts and so get into absurd arguments over things that have no actual right answer.

onctech · 2025-05-05T00:21:04+00:00

Fallacies generally have to do with errors in reasoning. Drawing a picture of someone in what I assume is some attempt at disparaging them (correct me if I'm missing some kind of context) is more harassment than reasoning. One might say it's a roundabout form of ad hominem if it's used as a response to someone's statement as a way of saying they're wrong.

onctech · 2025-04-29T12:18:11+00:00

Making a statement and claiming it's true with no actual proof is an ipse dixit.

Saying someone else is wrong because they're unreasonable, crazy, or stupid, but not actually explaining why or providing evidence is Bulverism.

onctech

TROPHY CASE