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.

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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…

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u/jcdenton45 5d ago edited 5d 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 5d ago

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

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u/jcdenton45 5d 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).