God I remember when I was 14 or something, this wasn't on Reddit but I inexplicably became fascinated by pointing out fallacies. It did not take long before people told me I was being incredibly annoying, clearly not understanding what I was talking about, not contributing anything meaningful to any discussion, and just generally being a smartass making a fool of myself.
The ones that really make my eye really twitch are:
Ad hominem fallacy
It's not a formal debate and ad hominem isn't some fancy Latin term for an insult. Imagine if someone's response to being insulted was "You just insulted me!"; yes, you got insulted. Congrats on figuring that out all by yourself.
No True Scotsman
This one comes up so damn often when a person establishes a definition. "You cannot be a pacifist and support the death penalty" kinda thing. It comes up most often in discussions about socialism/communism from the mouths of reactionaries. The NTS fallacy is inherently tautological by its definition; it must be something where the definition is used to dismiss evidence to the contrary. "No human being is taller than 3m" is not committing the NTS fallacy. If someone said "No human being is taller than 2.5m" and someone responded "But Robert Wadlow was over 2.7m" and the reply was "Well that means he wasn't human" that is the NTS fallacy. Otherwise every definition ever, and in fact every word ever, would be guilty of the fallacy as every single one of those necessarily excludes something.
Red Herring fallacy
This one comes up less often but it's just as obnoxious. You aren't having a formal debate and there is no explicit agreement about the bounds of the discussion. Anyone can bring anything up. If you don't understand why something is irrelevant then that's on you, you can ask. If something is completely irrelevant then you can just say "That's irrelevant" or you can ignore it.
Remember that one kid who would kick a ball around with your group and they'd always try and rules lawyer someone being out of bounds when everyone else is like "Bruh. We're just kicking a ball around for fun. There is no field, there are no painted lines, there is no umpire. Chill out."? This has the same energy.
Ummm, ackshually, people are only bothered by enlightened intellectuals pointing out their logical fallacies because it sheds to light their flawed reasoning and makes people defensive about how dumb they are.
Citing any of these
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies#Formal_fallacies
God I remember when I was 14 or something, this wasn't on Reddit but I inexplicably became fascinated by pointing out fallacies. It did not take long before people told me I was being incredibly annoying, clearly not understanding what I was talking about, not contributing anything meaningful to any discussion, and just generally being a smartass making a fool of myself.
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The ones that really make my eye really twitch are:
It's not a formal debate and ad hominem isn't some fancy Latin term for an insult. Imagine if someone's response to being insulted was "You just insulted me!"; yes, you got insulted. Congrats on figuring that out all by yourself.
This one comes up so damn often when a person establishes a definition. "You cannot be a pacifist and support the death penalty" kinda thing. It comes up most often in discussions about socialism/communism from the mouths of reactionaries. The NTS fallacy is inherently tautological by its definition; it must be something where the definition is used to dismiss evidence to the contrary. "No human being is taller than 3m" is not committing the NTS fallacy. If someone said "No human being is taller than 2.5m" and someone responded "But Robert Wadlow was over 2.7m" and the reply was "Well that means he wasn't human" that is the NTS fallacy. Otherwise every definition ever, and in fact every word ever, would be guilty of the fallacy as every single one of those necessarily excludes something.
This one comes up less often but it's just as obnoxious. You aren't having a formal debate and there is no explicit agreement about the bounds of the discussion. Anyone can bring anything up. If you don't understand why something is irrelevant then that's on you, you can ask. If something is completely irrelevant then you can just say "That's irrelevant" or you can ignore it.
Remember that one kid who would kick a ball around with your group and they'd always try and rules lawyer someone being out of bounds when everyone else is like "Bruh. We're just kicking a ball around for fun. There is no field, there are no painted lines, there is no umpire. Chill out."? This has the same energy.