#fallacy

A sane mind should not be guilty of a logical fallacy, yet there are very fine minds incapable of following mathematical demonstrations. ↗

— Henri Poincare

#fallacy #fine #following #guilty #incapable

I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-Left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#argumentation #fallacy #journalism #leftism #design

The fallacy in Peter's mind was this: he believed his relationship was dependent on his consistency in producing the qualities he thought had earned him the Lord's approval. ↗

— Lloyd Ogilvie

#fallacy #grace #relationship

For Paley, a watch is purposeful and thus must have been created by a being with a purpose. A watch needs a watchmaker, just as a world needs a world-maker—God. Yet both Wallace and Paley might have heeded the lesson from Voltaire's Candide (1759), in which Dr. Pangloss, a professor of "metaphysico-theology-cosmolonigology," through reason, logic, and analogy "proved" that this is the best of all possible worlds: '"Tis demonstrated that things cannot be otherwise; for, since everything is made for an end, everything is necessarily for the best end. Observe that noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spectacles. Legs were visibly instituted to be breeched, and we have breeches" (1985, p. 238). The absurdity of this argument was intended on the part of the author, for Voltaire firmly rejected the Panglossian paradigm that all is best in the best of all possible worlds. Nature is not perfectly designed, nor is this the best of all possible worlds. It is simply the world we have, quirky, contingent, and flawed as it may be. ↗

— Michael Shermer

#logic #pangloss #design

I think it's a fallacy that the harder you practice the better you get. ↗

— Buddy Rich

#fallacy #get #harder #i #i think

All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy. ↗

— John Ruskin

#effect #external #external things #fallacy #falseness

Most people have some appreciation of mathematics, just as most people can enjoy a pleasant tune; and there are probably more people really interested in mathematics than in music. Appearances suggest the contrary, but there are easy explanations. Music can be used to stimulate mass emotion, while mathematics cannot; and musical incapacity is recognized (no doubt rightly) as mildly discreditable, whereas most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity ↗

— G.H. Hardy

#math #mathematics #music #stupidity #music

Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy. ↗

— Niklaus Wirth

#another #belong #cannot #fallacy #languages

To pretend you don't feel a certain strangeness after living in England for 40 years is a fallacy. ↗

— Trevor McDonald

#certain #england #fallacy #feel #living

Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. ↗

— Benito Mussolini

#democracy #fallacy #practice #theory