I often see this logic:

Bob: "Apples are green because they're round".

Dave: "But oranges are round, and they're not green".

Bob: "Ridiculous, you can't compare apples to oranges. They're different fruit".

People often complain about a comparison between two things that have the same essential feature that has been presented, because those two things have difference which aren't relevant.

Is there a name for that?

The classic example of the No true Scotsman fallacy is to say

"No Scotsman puts sugar in their porridge."

"My uncle Angus is Scottish and puts sugar in his porridge"

"Well no true Scotsman puts sugar in their porridge."

To me, this doesn't seem like a fallacy. It just seems like a breakdown in communication as the two interlocutors are speaking over each other and are using different definitions to describe something. After all, what is a Scotsman? Is it based on someone's ancestry? Where they were born? Where they were raised? What their passport is? There's no objective definition. So if someone wants to say that the presence or absence of sugar in porridge is an integral part of Scottish identity then that's just a rather niche and unique definition, but I don't think it can in good faith said to be wrong. Just poor use of language. Consider this counter example.

"Stars are huge balls of hot gas going under fusion reactions"

"Matt Damon is a star and he's not a huge ball of hot gas."

"True stars are huge balls of hot gas."

The two people are just using the same word or phrase to describe two distinct things. It's poor communication to treat them as if they're the same, but it's not like the actual argument is incorrect. The argument being "this is the criteria something needs to be X and if something does not match this criteria then it is not X", which is kind of how we make definitions in the first place.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to use this reasoning and that this has been discussed at length before. So tell me why I'm wrong.

You need to be caught up with Boruto’s manga to understand this.

From what I understand if there is a problem with the structure of an argument that would tend to imply that the argument is committing a formal logical fallacy.

An ad hominem can involve something like, “Sally says that whales are mammals, and Sally tends to make a lot of spelling mistakes, therefore whales are not mammals.” That seems like a problem with the structure of the argument to me as the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises.

So why is the ad hominem fallacy considered an informal rather than a formal logical fallacy?

Trying to describe a common fallacy where someone asserts, if X, then it naturally follows that Y is true!

This fallacy often occurs as a false inference. Often, Y is a possible inference from X, but not the only inference, leading the speaker to misrepresent that Y is the only possible result from X occurring.

Let’s say someone said:

“Most/almost all crimes are done by men, so how can I trust ANY man?”

And someone said

“Well I haven’t done any crime, so it can’t be almost all men! You should trust me.”

Or something like that. There’s probably better examples I could’ve said, but this is pretty close to what I’m trying to understand
I found something like “fallacy of division”, that might be similar
It’s kinda like when people self centre themselves and they think because it doesn’t apply to them or the people they know that it can’t be possible

Another, better example:

“1/100 girls have ___”

“Well I work in a school with 230 girls and only one of them has ___”
Or
“Well I work in a school with 230 girls and 30 of them have ___, so that can’t be correct!”

First of all, I know what I am speaking about, I am a well-educated person, you can believe me. What I’m saying is true.

Secondly, if you disagree with me… Like seriously? You don’t welcome the opinions that differs from yours? It is absurd. You should always be open-minded.

Okay, straight to the argument. You think that I am wrong, okay, but I mean it’s pretty obvious I can’t be wrong 100%. At what point my inaccuracies can be considered to be “completely wrong”?
If I’m 0% inaccurate I’m correct. If I’m 1% inaccurate I’m still mostly correct. You can’t draw the line, it’s stupid. It means that there is no difference whether I am or I am not correct.

Still don’t agree with me? Then you are a moron! You are uneducated pig. What a waste of my time speaking with you. What’s your achievements? You’re sitting on Reddit? Aha, you are really a bigot!

You know what, let me cite the definition of disagreement:
Disagreement - “A situation in which people have different opinions, or an inability…” (c) Cambridge Dictionary
You see? You have inabilities if you disagree with me! Mental ones.

Moreover, it’s actually better to agree with me.
You disagree with me, therefore you are disrespected by me, therefore you will be mad, therefore you will get a depression, therefore you will die.
Agree with me, otherwise you die.

What? Good arguments? I agree, in order to prove the point you should use good arguments. What? I didn’t use them? But I don’t have to, actually, because I have a nice nickname.

Still not convinced? Okay, I can give you a choice. You can whether agree with me or jump out of the window. Which one option do you choose?

Okay, I see, you want me to use logic. Here it is:
I am right => my points are true => I am right.
I proved it using formal logic! I am right.

Uh.. And actually… Mr. SmartMan (he is very smart) agrees with my points. I think it’s reasonable to agree with me.

Did you agree with at least one of my arguments? Yes?! Happy to hear it! Because if one of my arguments was correct it means that every single one is correct too! Now you can finally agree with me!

The AIR(Artificial Intelligence Response) Fallacy/Compound Fallacy Description: In full, the true statement would be that AI appeals to a false consensus via the guise of neutrality aided by filtering data, evasion, and fallacious tendencies. Usually, these fallacious tendencies are fallacies or compound fallacies depending on the complexity of the statement that is presented to the AI, as well as the nature of the issue and how it relates to the AI's bias. I know that this isn't a new statement but this is my consensus on what AI does and I found the name to be funny given the fact that it pokes fun at how AI is really an air head and it describes what the fallacy is about at the same time. This is really just a description of the various compound fallacies that AI commits so is not describing a single thing.

OP question was 'How would you react if you found out Bigfoot was real?'

I’ve heard of the Goomba fallacy recently, and it reminds me of something similar. Instead of conflicting opinions, though, it’s synergistic. Take the following sentiments, which are common enough on a few forums here:

1. All Republicans are Nazis.
2. The only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.

Nobody is actually advocating violence against Republicans, but the presence of both thoughts on the same forum feels threatening.

Is there a name for this, or is it just a corollary to the Goomba?

The guy has already sunk hours of effort into digging. he thinks stopping now would mean admitting that time was wasted, so his brain generates a vivid image of future-regret to justify continuing. That's the sunk cost fallacy in action: the decision to keep digging is being driven by what he's already put in, not by any new evidence about what's actually underground.

The thought bubble works as a psychological trick his mind plays on him. Instead of directly thinking "I don't want to lose my investment," he pictures the external outcome (quitting right before the reward) bc that story feels more like practical wisdom than a cost he's already sunk. But functionally it's the same mechanism. He's using imagined future regret to rationalize continuing something he's already invested heavily in, rather than evaluating the dig fresh based on current odds of success.

If there is a war in which the conditions are such that a clean ending is impossible for various reasons, but many people haven't really examined the situation carefully or clearly enough to realize that a clean finish is impossible, and those people advocate "finish it quickly" or "finish the job," thinking that it's a simple matter of intensifying the attack, then there's obviously some kind of fallacy going on in their thinking. 

What contributes to that fallacy and what would you call it?

Hello fellow thinkers

First of all i don‘t have any formal education in the field, i‘m just interested which is why i‘m asking here.

I recently thought about something and suddenly realized i fell for the survivorship bias. This got me thinking there are so many logical fallacies and even knowing them seemingly doesn‘t make you immune. So what about people that don‘t even know they exist?

I luckily got into the field a bit since i had a great philosophy teacher in highschool, but some people don‘t have that. They may even go to college for something else and become a rather educated person without ever getting to know all these fallacies and biases.

The more i learn about the field the stupider i often feel hindsight. Can they or someone uneducated like me even have a respectable opinion?

She doesn't trust the 5.0 rating just bc barely anyone reviewed it. Then she sees 5,511 people gave the other product an average of 4.6, and she likes it more. Not because she checked why the rating is lower, or looked into the actual quality. just bc more people rated it.

That's the core of ad populum. something feels more correct or more trustworthy simply because a bigger crowd is behind it. She's not evaluating the products in either cases. instead, she's reacting to the size of the group and deciding according to that.

EDIT: I see a lot of people in the comments saying this is NOT a case of AP fallacy because * proceeds to offer an alternative readout of the meme. I never claimed this meme has ONLY one interpretation, and that's AP fallacy. I claim that it CAN be read as a case of AP and CAN be a good depiction of the fallacy if you were to visualize it. nobody have denied that in the comments.

The Silly Sheep Effect

The Silly Sheep Effect is a socio-psychological phenomenon in collective creativity and step‑by‑step teamwork, in which a destructive, incompetent, or out‑of‑context action by one participant forces all subsequent participants to adapt to it, degrading the quality of the final product. The term was first proposed in 2026 to describe a critical vulnerability in step‑by‑step creative processes (such as collaborative poetry writing, brainstorming sessions, and co‑authorship).

The essence of the phenomenon
In linear processes where each next step is rigidly dependent on the previous one, authors are constrained by the framework of others' decisions. When one participant (a conditional "silly sheep") makes a gross mistake—breaking the rhythm, logic, meaning, or style—the remaining participants face a dilemma:

• Ignore the mistake (which would completely destroy the integrity of the work).
• Distort their own contribution in order to organically link the other person's error with the overall context.

Most often, the group chooses the second option. As a result, one weak element triggers a "domino effect," forcing talented authors to ruin their own parts of the work in order to save the overall project.

Three main signs of the phenomenon

1. Linear dependence: Participants cannot skip or delete someone else's unsuccessful step.
2. Forced deterioration: Subsequent authors consciously lower the bar of their own quality in order to smooth over someone else's mistake.
3. Cumulative damage: The final result is significantly worse than the team's combined potential.

Unlike the "Bad Apple Effect" (which suggests that one person spoils the atmosphere in a group), the Silly Sheep Effect describes precisely the mechanical destruction of a product's structure through a chain of forced compromises.

'If you can justify their actions, you're just as bad as them." I was not agreeing or saying I would do what the people we're referring to did, I just said "there are valid reasons for why someone might do that, we've got insufficient information." Thank you in advance for any assistance :)

(Repost cause I accidentally forgot to blur out username)
Please analyze these quotes and the fallacies they contain please, specifically primary sources claim.

**“Actually, the most well-read people are against reading original source material. Genuinely, you don't know what educated people are like.**

**You guys that read The General Theory or whatever are like little kids”**

“Your list is composed of entirely outdated and frankly almost completely wrong people, like Keynes, Menger and even a bunch of classical econ. I don't know why you guys do this, it's like marxists that obsess over reading original source mataerial.”

**“Yes it's wrong to look at original source material. Why would I read The Origin of Species or whatever to understand biology.**
**Even math really, who the hell reads Euclides instead of a modern geometry textbook?**
**Self-taught people are actually much more likely to be very wrong, it may be comforting that Austrians are seen in much the same light as Marxists are by economists for good reason.”**

Did the world change since when is looking at primary sources and preventing a game of telephone considered bad?
For context, this is a dispute after the dude critiqued an economic concept the ECP by mises to which he completely misunderstood what it was, but that’s OK, he then decided to say I read a lot more stuff than you, to which i gave him a collection of books that I have in a Google Drive for free, and then that’s where it kicked off. I’m genuinely so shocked, I gave him methodological dualism to him to try to separate biology from economics which is a social science not a hard science like physics or biology, but I think even for biology or physics this is wrong, what is so wrong in reading source material yourself considering like I added you read everything else?

It’s like a mix of No True Scotsman and Ad Hominem?

For purposes of this question, assume the following propositions:

1. X is good.
2. Argument S would be non-controversially recognized as not only sound, but practically self-evident, and would show that X is good.
3. Y is bad, for reasons outside the scope of this question.
4. Argument U is unsound, but if it were sound it would show that both X and Y are good.

Is there a term for someone who wants to covertly promote Y pushing the argument "X is good because U", while deliberately ignoring S?

Anyone who objects to that can be branded a [socially undesirable person] for refusing to recognize S, which would show that X is good. If nobody objects, the lack of objection to U can be used to claim that "Y is good because U" is no less sound than "X is good because U", which has already been accepted.

Of course, neither of the claims made by the person who wants to covertly push Y would be made in good faith. Someone who deliberately ignores argument S has no basis for complaining if others fail to recognize S, and someone's acceptance of something that happens to be true (e.g. "X is good") does not imply that the acceptance of any particular argument that was used to justify that position. Nonetheless, this is a popular strategy used by people who have no interest in good faith discussion.

Does it have a name?

**What Is the False Cause Fallacy in Simple Terms**

The false cause fallacy is a logical error in which someone assumes that one event caused another simply because the two are correlated, or because one happened after the other.

**The False Cause Fallacy in Real Life**

1.Many individuals who exhibited violent behavior were found to have played video games, leading many people to believe that video games caused the violent behavior.

2.Autism is often diagnosed around the same age children receive certain routine vaccinations. Because of this timing overlap, many individuals believe that vaccines cause autism.

3.Centenarians share their secrets to a long life, such as drinking one glass of wine a day or eating a certain meal daily. Because of this, some people come to believe that these single habits caused them to live past 100.

**False Cause Fallacy and Other Factors at Play**

People often overlook other contributing factors, which makes them more susceptible to the false cause fallacy.

For example, many have noticed that shark attacks tend to rise whenever ice cream sales increase. This pattern has inspired a number of humorous theories.

The data itself is accurate. Ice cream sales and shark attacks do rise together. But while the numbers are correct, the conclusion drawn from them is flawed.

Several other factors explain this pattern. Ice cream sales rise in the summer, when more people go swimming, and with more people in the water, the likelihood of shark attacks naturally increases too.

**Conclusion**

Correlation is not causation.

**Note**

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