Comment on Carl Sagan's 9 timeless lessons for detecting baloney

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damnedfurry@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

It’s also important to keep in mind that a fallacious argument leading to a conclusion does not actually disprove the conclusion; identifying the fallacy just means that if the conclusion is correct, that argument is not the path to it. And if the fallacious argument is the only path to conclusion X, then there is simply no basis for presuming X to be correct at all.

red herring: might as well call it by its social media names: “ackshyually”, “whataboutism”, etc.

Well, “ackshyually” is actually (:P) rooted in mocking people who pedantically and pointlessly correct others, to the point of being more irritating than informative. The ‘Jimmy Neutron salt’ meme is a pretty good example of this:

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Red herrings as a type of fallacy, on the other hand are about using something to support an argument that doesn’t actually have anything to do with it. The Wikipedia page itself gives a solid example of this:

For example, “I think we should make the academic requirements stricter for students. I recommend you support this because we are in a budget crisis, and we do not want our salaries affected.” The second sentence, though used to support the first sentence, does not address that topic.

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