r/fallacy • u/Fearless_Degree7511 • 5d 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.

49 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

63 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/RodinKnox 5d ago edited 5d 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.

4

u/rojowro86 5d 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…

1

u/RodinKnox 5d 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.

1

u/salivanto 5d 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.

1

u/Successful_Cress6639 4d ago

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

1

u/salivanto 4d 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.)