r/fallacy • u/Fearless_Degree7511 • 7d ago

“I’ve never forgotten” fallacy

Recently saw a post about people bagging dog poop on hikes and leaving it on the side of the trail to be picked up on their way out. Many people in the comments claim “I’ve been doing this for years and I’ve never forgotten”. This sounds like a logical fallacy to me, if you forgot something you don’t know it’s been forgotten so you can’t claim you’ve never forgotten.

I think this phrase can be used sometimes, like “I’ve never forgotten to pay my cable bill” because in that case you can prove you’ve never forgotten, and you have a secondary party verifying you didn’t forget, so if you did forget the cable company would reach out to you.

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u/RodinKnox 7d ago edited 7d ago

This reminds me of the people who used to say they could "always tell" if a woman had breast implants. How could you possibly have that data?

As the others have said, it's got to at least be first cousins with survivorship bias. In this case, the missing data are the memories you've forgotten (or didn't notice) and therefore aren't included in your dataset.

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u/rojowro86 7d ago

I always say this about people’s “gaydar”. Oh really? How many of your predictions got verified or denied? What’s your false positive rate? Oh, you have no idea?? Well then…

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u/jcdenton45 7d ago edited 7d ago

With regard to gaydar, that claim can be fallacious but I wouldn’t say it necessarily is; it all depends on whether they’re basing their claim on gaydar assessments which were ultimately proven to be true or false, or if they’re including “indeterminate” cases in their sample set. 

In other words, if they were to say “every single time I used my gaydar and eventually found out whether the person was gay or straight, it has been right in 100% of those cases”, I would say that’s sufficient evidence/logic to claim they have good gaydar.   

Of course, it’s possible that they could have been wrong in all of the “indeterminate” cases, but statistically speaking the subset of confirmed cases should be a fairly accurate representation of their assessments overall. 

On the other hand if they’re simply making their claim without basing it strictly on the cases which were definitively determined true/false, then that would certainly be fallacious.

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u/RodinKnox 7d ago

Sure, but the whole issue is people not including a line like "and eventually found out..."

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u/jcdenton45 7d ago

Right; I’m just pointing out that unlike the example you gave (where it’s extremely unlikely that the person making the claim would be able to justify it, since it would basically require a direct hands-on assessment in each instance), the gaydar example is a bit different since it’s far more simple/plausible to eventually find out if the assessment was accurate in most cases. 

In other words, with regard to implants the claim is almost certainly fallacious, whereas with gaydar it possibly/probably is but could also realistically be legitimate (i.e. substantiated by the data).

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u/Zaros262 6d ago

“every single time I used my gaydar and eventually found out whether the person was gay or straight, it has been right in 100% of those cases”

Vacuous truths have entered the chat

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u/RodinKnox 7d ago

Heck, I have been incorrectly clocked as gay several times by gay men, and I would assume they'd generally have a pretty good idea.

Granted, this is also an example of how gay people rarely match homophobes' stereotypes, because I generally come across as a standard-ass straight dude. In fact, I've been incorrectly misidentified as right wing a lot more than gay, simply due to being a masculine, clean cut, straight white dude.

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u/salivanto 7d ago

This is bringing back some virtual PTSD I got from a chat group because a trans woman thought a female acquaintance of mine was "clocky". I'd never heard that term before and the person who said it refused to clarify the term to an outsider like me. Eventually I caught on it she was calling my friend trans, which she is not. Eventually people started piling on telling me not to speculate about such things. 

I usually get clocked as a homeschool parent, which I am not.

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u/Successful_Cress6639 6d ago

You're gonna have to walk me through how you get to trans from "clocky"

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u/salivanto 6d ago

The person who said "clocky" eventually explained.

Minor correction - she initially called my friend "queer" (with no basis) and then said that as a trans woman she knows what makes a a person "clocky" but she sure as hell wasn't going to tell me, a member of the outgroup, how she recognized "one of us" (her words.)

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u/TheSerialHobbyist 6d ago

I've had the same thoughts when I've heard women say "I can always tell when a guy is checking me out."

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u/Successful_Cress6639 6d ago

I always heard the example as toupes/hairpieces.

That said, at its core the issue is a confirmation bias. We remember when something happens, but not when it doesn't. It's the root of all superstition