short stories
...ith my friends and I see a beautiful car, say a Mercedes CLK, the first thing that pops up in my mind is that the guy driving the car must be a rich basterd. Even my friends agree with me when I tell them. I don’t know why this happens. I guess its because I am used to thinking that expensive cars can only be bought by rich people. But what if a guy who is making 10 dollars an hour is leasing it. I just committed a fallacy by assuming that the owner is rich because of his beautiful ride. A second common fallacy that occurs in my life is the “Argumentum ad novitatem”. The atheist website describe this fallacy as the opposite of the argumentum ad antiquitatem; it’s the fallacy of asserting that something is better or more correct simply because it is new, or newer than something else. (www.infidels.org/news/atheism/logic.html) I use this all the time. If I go to a shoe store, say footlocker, I always end up buying the pair of shoes that look newer or just came out. I don’t know why, the newer models attract my attention faster even if the other shoes are much better. Another example would be when I am buying a computer. Simply because it says Dell, I assume it is much better than those computers they sell in those small computer stores. But if you really compare the different parts, you can buy a better computer from the small stores for a hell of a lot cheaper. Another commonly used fallacy I use would be the “cum hoc ergo propter hoc”. This fallacy says that because two events occur together, they must be causally related. It’s a fallacy because it ignores other factors that may be the cause(s) of events. (www.infidels.org/news/atheism/logic.html) The atheist website used the following example: “Literacy rates have steadily declined since the advent of television. Clearly television viewing impedes learning”. I sometimes argue that rap music or even heavy metal has a lot of violent lyrics which little kids listen to. This mak...