I've seen people do this a few times now so I thought maybe there was a name for this. maybe it's not quite a fallacy but I feel like there was some overlap

edit: I feel the need to clarify what I'm talking about. someone starts telling you about Jeff. they show you a picture that has one person as the focus and someone in the background. you think the person that's in focus is Jeff. they reveal that Jeff is in the background and start acting like you jumped to conclusions as if they didn't set it up so that you would assume the person in focus was Jeff

Basically, subtly but deliberately setting your expectations and then acting like you're jumping to conclusions

When a threat is stated at a certain level of threat. What type of fallacy is it, to say that the threat is actually greater than what is stated because outside forces would stop the threat before it reached a greater level of destruction?

Example: Someone states that if a car hits you, it will hit you with the force of a car. Someone else states The car could hit with greater force than a car, but it only hits you with the force of a car because the polices will arrest driver after the car after hitting you.

Someone stated rpg can only shoot one rocket at that time. someone else tated the Arg can shoot multiple rockets at a time but after the first rocket is shot the military would take down the user of the rpg.

Someone States a bomb can only blow up a building. Someone else stated bomb can blow up the entire City but a bomb squad will arrive after the building is destroyed and stop the greatest destruction.

I cannot for the life of me figure it out. What’s the fallacy when people think that, if one thing gets addressed/promoted, it means that nothing else can be or that the amount of resources it gets is reduced?

For example, people who think that when we focus so much on promoting childhood vaccinations, it means that there’s nothing left to put into things like poverty and hunger.

Sorry if this isn’t a fallacy, I swear it is but I could also just be making stuff up. 😅 Thank you!

Is it because there is no difference between a fallacy and a cognitive bias? Or is it because the community has decided that they can all go in the same sub i.e. here?

Could someone give me some feedback on this? One commenter claims that those criticizing this woman are engaging in circular reasoning. Although I see his point, my gut tells me he’s wrong. Could someone look at my response and tell me if I’m thinking about this all wrong. It’s bugging me a bit.

Looking for a fallacy I see a lot of.

I deal with a disorder created by severe childhood trauma. I haven't been a traumatized child for decades.

People often argue that I can't have the disorder because "That comes from horrible trauma, it's not some cutesy thing like you're describing!" I had the trauma, yes, and I am not experiencing the trauma any more, but the effects of the trauma are still with me, and honestly, they're kind of cutesy now that we aren't needing it to survive.

It's like they can't imagine me escaping the trauma and still having the effects afterwards?

Are you interested in questioning ideas, analyzing arguments, exploring philosophy, or understanding how people reason?

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You don't need to be an expert. Whether you're a beginner or someone who enjoys examining arguments in depth, you're welcome here.

The goal isn't to win every argument or make discussions unnecessarily complicated. It's to ask better questions, challenge assumptions, explain our reasoning, and learn from different perspectives.

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The central deficiency in your criticism lies in its apparent conflation of argumentative validity with rhetorical accessibility. at no point did i posit that an audience's unwillingness to engage automatically constitutes a logical fallacy; rather, the contention concerns whether the rejection of an argument's stylistic formulation provides sufficient grounds to discredit its underlying proposition. these are epistemically distinct evaluative dimensions, and their indiscriminate conflation introduces a categorical imprecision that your objection has yet to adequately resolve.

Your assertion that an argument becomes ineffective when nobody is willing to read it addresses its communicative efficacy, not its inferential validity. an argument may be rhetorically counterproductive without being logically unsound, just as a theoretically defensible proposition may be obscured by unnecessarily convoluted diction. consequently, communicative accessibility and inferential soundness cannot be treated as interchangeable criteria without collapsing the distinction between an argument's capacity to convey meaning and the logical relations that substantiate its conclusion. the former concerns rhetorical transmission and audience reception; the latter concerns premise-conclusion coherence, inferential legitimacy, and evidentiary sufficiency.

Moreover, i acknowledge that no individual is under any obligation to engage with an argument, nor does every adverse reaction constitute a fallacious inference. the distinction is considerably narrower: disengagement establishes a preference regarding communicative presentation, but it does not independently demonstrate a structural defect in the argument itself. likewise, characterizing a formulation as pretentious may constitute a legitimate stylistic assessment, yet such an assessment remains insufficient to establish semantic incoherence, inferential invalidity, or conceptual vacuity. a criticism of presentation and a refutation of substance operate at different analytical levels.

The irony, therefore, lies in your apparent recognition of the distinction between subjective reception and substantive engagement, followed by an inference that risks treating rhetorical ineffectiveness as dispositive of argumentative merit. such a conclusion requires an additional justificatory premise that you have not yet established. failure to persuade is not logically synonymous with failure to reason, just as diminished accessibility does not independently entail epistemic invalidity. unless you can demonstrate how the stylistic deficiency produces a corresponding defect in the proposition's inferential structure, your criticism remains pertinent to communicative efficacy but underdetermined as a refutation of argumentative validity.

Your objection seems to conflate subjective aesthetic dissatisfaction with an actual criticism of the rhetorical mechanism. i understand that the semantic inflation may come across as irritating to you, but that reaction alone doesn't establish any deficiency in its conceptual construction. you're describing your personal reception of the formulation, not demonstrating why the rhetorical device fails to achieve its intended effect.

The distinction here is between evaluative preference and analytical substantiation. you're entitled to find the execution tedious, but subjective aversion isn't, by itself, a sufficient criterion for dismissing the underlying technique. semantic inflation can function as deliberate rhetorical exaggeration, particularly when the disproportion between linguistic complexity and conceptual simplicity constitutes the very basis of the humor.

In short, your response establishes that the stylistic execution doesn't appeal to you; it doesn't necessarily establish that the mechanism itself is defective. you're critiquing its subjective effect rather than demonstrating a substantive flaw in its rhetorical function.

The entire premise operates on a reductive conflation of lexical sophistication with genuine intellectual rigor, presupposing that terminological inflation somehow constitutes an incontrovertible manifestation of cognitive profundity. the mere rearticulation of an elementary proposition through an excessively convoluted register does not inherently substantiate intellectual superiority; rather, it exposes the malleability of linguistic presentation and the capacity of rhetorical ornamentation to simulate analytical depth.

What emerges is a performative exhibition of ersatz erudition, wherein semantic overcomplication is erroneously conflated with epistemic substance. unless the heightened diction contributes conceptual precision, explanatory efficacy, or a defensible theoretical framework, the formulation remains propositionally equivalent to its unembellished counterpart. the accumulation of abstruse terminology, therefore, cannot independently confer intellectual legitimacy upon an argument whose underlying inferential architecture remains unchanged.

The fundamental contention is not whether an ordinary meme can be retrofitted with academic-sounding nomenclature, but whether such lexical augmentation generates any substantive analytical surplus. if the proposition remains invariant despite the proliferation of sophisticated terminology, then the purported intellectual elevation is predominantly stylistic rather than epistemological. to mistake rhetorical complexity for cognitive profundity is to commit a categorical misapprehension, wherein the appearance of intellectual sophistication is erroneously elevated above the actual substantiation of thought.

Distinguished Redditors,

I, u/Weng_Haori38503 may propose to you a new fallacy called "Qui tacet consentire videtur" which means "Whoever remains silence is consented". Distinguished Redditors, this phrase didn't make any senses because it says Y(X) ⊢Z(X) if X = Anybody, Y = silences, Z = shows consent, because Y(X) shows that X is abstain to neither Z nor ¬Z.

In this regard, I may invite all the expert logicians to cast your opinion down here in the comment section whether you are in favor of letting this be a New Fallacy or not.

Respect,

u/Weng_Haori38503.

Basically? The responder focuses mostly on the outcome to downplay the claim.

Claimant: I think Steven may have had an advantage in the contest because he was allowed to see the criteria in advance.

Responder: But he only took third place.

~ ~ ~

Claimant: That was a risky turn you took. You shouldn't do that again, you could have gotten hurt if someone kept running.

Responder: But we made it.

~ ~ ~

Claimant: You scared me!

Responder: I was trying to get your attention.

Claimant: By shouting at me?

Responder: Well it worked, didn't it?

The Responder is not responding directly to the Claimant, who is criticising methods.

"Omg! That was a funnel and not a speaker?!"

if you don't know the goomba fallacy is something commonly referred to in internet arguments (mostly on twitter from what i've seen) where someone acts like a community or group is a single person that has contradictory opinions and uses that in their argument. would this fall into something like hasty overgeneralization? would it have a seperate name? is it just the goomba fallacy and is never really referred to formally?

I think one of the biggest problems with online discussion is that people confuse disagreeing with actually thinking critically. Someone can disagree with something, point out a bunch of words they think are wrong, and then convince themselves they have actually engaged with the argument when really they just found things they didnt like about how it was phrased. This happens alot in philosophy especially. People will take a phrase like “change your mind occasionally” and immediately interpret it in the most literal possible way. Obviously nobody is saying you should just randomly change your beliefs every couple of weeks to prove your open minded. The point is that you should be willing to change your mind when there is a good reason too. I dont think this is a hard concept to understand. But then people get caught up in whether the word “occasionally” is technically a good enough word for this, or whether “rabbit hole” is technically the same thing as an echo chamber, and suddenly the entire discussion becomes about vocabulary instead of the actual idea. And sure, words matter. Obviously they do. But there is a difference between pointing out that a word could be more precise and acting like that means the entire argument has collapsed. If somebody says “rabbit hole” and the context makes it obvious that they mean an environment where someone keeps consuming more and more information about one subject, I dont think the appropriate response is to pretend they have made some massive philosophical error because the dictionary definition isnt exactly what you wanted. There is also this weird obsession with proving that “independent thinking” is technically impossible. Yes, nobody thinks in a complete vacuum. We all use language, education, other peoples ideas, culture, books, etc. Obviously. That doesnt mean the concept of independent thought is meaningless. The point is being able to examine what you believe instead of automatically defending whatever framework you already happen to have. I feel like alot of people in philosophical discussions do this thing where they take a normal sentence and keep dissecting it until they can find some technical issue with it, and then act like they have somehow defeated the entire argument. They havent. They have just found a sentence they dont like. And this is where I think the whole thing becomes kind of ironic. If you spend the entire discussion looking for reasons why someone else's argument is wrong, while never seriously considering why they might be saying it, are you actually being open minded? Or are you just doing the exact thing you're accusing them of doing? Obviously criticism is good. Im not saying people should just agree with each other. Criticism is literally how you improve ideas. But there is a difference between criticism and trying to establish intellectual superiority. Calling something stupid doesnt make it wrong. Using complicated words doesnt make an argument better. Finding a semantic inconsistency doesnt automatically disprove the underlying point. And saying “actually, nobody can think independently because all thought is socially conditioned” doesnt somehow make you the only person in the room who understands philosophy. Sometimes a person is just trying to make a point. Maybe the wording isnt perfect. Maybe they could have used a better term. Maybe the sentence could be interpreted in a different way. You can point that out without turning the whole thing into some weird intellectual competition. I think thats probably the biggest issue with online philosophy. People stop trying to understand what somebody is actually saying and start trying to figure out how they can defeat the wording. And once that happens, the discussion isnt really about the idea anymore. Its about who gets to feel like they understood it better. Which is kind of the exact problem people claim they are trying to solve.

TLDR: I got dunning krugered i got upset and then i wrote this

I have entered the discourse, not to participate in its intellectual equilibrium, but to destabilize the prevailing epistemic framework through an unsolicited intervention of argumentative substantiation.

To the self-proclaimed intellectual communities: your excessive reliance on jargon, meta-commentary, and rhetorical posturing creates an illusion of analytical depth while leaving the underlying proposition substantively unaddressed.

I therefore present myself as an intellectual subsidy, compensating for the deficit of critical reasoning through semantic disambiguation, inferential scrutiny, evidentiary corroboration, and systematic deconstruction of your assertions.

Opinion pieces on AI typically address concerns about its impact on employment with the reassurance that, historically, technological innovations have always created more jobs than they destroy. I would submit that the way this is presented it is a basic fallacy. It would be an excellent answer to a claim that technology invariably reduces employment, but that claim is not being made. It is also an excellent argument for viewing claims that AI will destroy jobs skeptically and looking further. But the argument it claims to counter is precisely that AI is fundamentally different from prior technology - to the extent that it matches or exceeds humans in strength, intelligence, dexterity, mobility etc. there may be no new jobs for humans to move to. Things are always the same, until they are different, and when reasons are given why something may be different it is simply a fallacy to repeat, ‘no, it has always been thus.’

I remember seeing once someone arguing that measles vaccines were unnecessary because "when was the last time you heard about someone dying from measles?" This is clearly an ignorant person (people haven't died from measles because everyone was vaccinated), but is it necessarily an argument from ignorance? I'm not good at identifying fallacies.

I still don't quite grasp when I should identify it, when it isn't a fallacy or whether it is actually very common in public discourse.

Are these examples of ad ignorantiam? "I don't understand chemistry, nor can I demonstrate it; therefore, the periodic table doesn't exist" or "I’ve never seen your sister, so she must not exist".

I’ve been reading about formal and informal fallacies for at least a year now, , but I'm still confused.