more complaints !
why are people calling every structured argument a fallacy ?
its only a fallacy if it is false.
if i call to my own authority on a subject and back it up with say my own research, that is not a fallacy.
if i refer to a slippery slope of say censorship. thats not a fallacy, i can literally point to every censorship campaign in history and prove that they start with subversive topics before moving to minorities on the guise they are part of the subversion.
like tbh, too many idiots think their opinion matters and learned a handful of fallacies by name and structure to 'prove' it. most of them i see brought up are informal fallacies, the two examples above are informal fallacies.
an informal fallacy requires additional context to be a fallacy. arguing against gay marriage cause 'people will marry their dogs' is a slippery slope fallacy because we have proof that A does not spiral into B. Saying I have a degree and am therefore right about the migration patterns of ducks is an appeal to false authority (the 'name' of the authority fallacy) because my degree has nothing to do with animals, let alone migrating birds.
formal fallacies exist, fallacies in which the very structure disproves the argument, but they are not often pointed out. arguing that the polio vaccine causes disease because we see more sick kids with the vaccine than without is a formal fallacy.
that example specifically is a base rate fallacy, arguing about a certain conclusion based on current rates without considering previous effects. as in the example, the base rate of vaccinated vs unvaccinated kids is not being taken into account. an argument that 5 unvaccinated kids vs 20 vaccinated kids got sick ignores the rate of 5 out of 10 unvaccinated and 20 out of 2000 vaccinated. (these numbers are not real, they are example).
