Cherry Picking
Also: Anecdotal Evidence, Texas Sharpshooter,
Jumping to Conclusions, Hasty Generalization, Overgeneralizing,
Confirmation Bias, Spotlight Fallacy, Nut-Picking
Class: Distort
Jumping to Conclusions, Hasty Generalization, Overgeneralizing,
Confirmation Bias, Spotlight Fallacy, Nut-Picking
Class: Distort
Using only the examples that support your side while ignoring the other examples.
When picking cherries from a tree, you pick
only the ripe ones, leaving the others.
People claim the seagulls are attacking more, but this graph proves seagull attacks are going down.
You graphed only the one month when attacks went down. When you graph the whole year it’s going up on average.
He’s the financial genius who predicted the stock market crash.
Hundreds of people made predictions, and some of them got it right by dumb luck. The real question is how many other predictions did he get right?
Conservatives want to nuke North Korea!
Only Senator Schmoe said that. You can’t just nut-pick the craziest person to represent all conservatives.
All the news posts I see on Facebook prove the moon landing was faked!
Once the Facebook algorithm learns you like conspiracy theories, it keeps putting similar stories in your feed, so you never see other viewpoints.
Foolacy vs. Fallacy
Confirmation Bias: Cherry-picking because you don’t want to change your mind.
Texas Sharpshooter: Cherry-picking from random data to find a non-random conclusion.
Jumping to Conclusions / Hasty Generalization: Forming a conclusion after only the first or few examples (unaware other examples may differ).
Spotlight Fallacy: Jumping to conclusions from sensational news stories (unaware of other non-newsworthy counter-examples).Based on their arguments alone, you might not have enough information to know if the speaker was intentionally or unintentionally choosing too few examples, or why exactly. All you can tell is that there are too few examples, so it’s more practical to combine all these into one large foolacy.
This foolacy includes several overlapping fallacies that involve a sample size error: using too few examples that are not representative of the whole.
Cherry Picking, Anecdotal Evidence: Intentionally choosing examples that support your predetermined conclusion.Confirmation Bias: Cherry-picking because you don’t want to change your mind.
Texas Sharpshooter: Cherry-picking from random data to find a non-random conclusion.
Jumping to Conclusions / Hasty Generalization: Forming a conclusion after only the first or few examples (unaware other examples may differ).
Spotlight Fallacy: Jumping to conclusions from sensational news stories (unaware of other non-newsworthy counter-examples).Based on their arguments alone, you might not have enough information to know if the speaker was intentionally or unintentionally choosing too few examples, or why exactly. All you can tell is that there are too few examples, so it’s more practical to combine all these into one large foolacy.