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Thank you for being the voice of reason and your patience with some people. A lot of people succumb to The Toupee Fallacy (A form of selection bias in which a thing whose quality is measured in terms of being difficult to detect is wrongly judged to be of poor quality in general, caused by the fact that most people only notice poor quality instances of it.).

I stopped showering every day for medical reasons and under medical supervision when I was young, and that really helped with my smell(Turns out I had both a fungal infection, and a hormonal disorder), and the habit stayed. My hair and my skin do a lot better, and due to the nature of my job, I would certainly know if I smelled, since I am often meeting clients and other team leads.

Having a bidet, applying deodorant daily and changing my clothes daily as well, added to working in climate controlled spaces, away from the sun, crowds and smelly habits like smoking are all factors that some people seem incapable of even considering.

But of course, this is Lemmy, where nuance often just fucking dies.

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FishFace@piefed.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Yeah. I guess you can analyse it as:

Denying the antecedent: “showering every day prevents smelling bad, therefore if you don’t shower every day, you will smell bad”

Confirmation & Selection bias: “that person smells bad, therefore they can’t shower every day, making them an example of not showering every day leading to smelling bad”

Bias of anecdotal evidence, presumably - at least, I’m assuming that most such people really do smell bad to themselves after only a day, which is treated as a reliable indicator of everyone’s condition.

It’s quite interesting to me, because it clearly becomes a very emotive topic when the difference between waiting one, two or three days to bathe is pretty abstract. I have developed a hypothesis that it’s the feeling of having a shower when one is feeling sticky and sweaty and dirty, and then coming out feeling nice and clean, that gets readily associated with bad odour. I then think that this link simply can’t form easily if your feeling when coming out of the shower is not “nice and clean” but “disgusting ball of skin-flakes held together only by paraffin and artificial grease”.

I have encountered this kind of attitude before but I was actually surprised to find it that prevalent here, because I expected more people to be sympathetic to conditions which require deviation from the norm.
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