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Is there a term for the opposite - presuming you're smarter than a huge team of full time employees with specialist knowledge and access to data you don't have?


In their defence, sometimes organisations are stupid where individuals are not.

Many people might realise that cloning is an unaccounted for aspect of a 2FA, but the manager in charge, say, thinks cloning is not a realistic possibility and so doesn't allow it to be taken into account. Or, the manager does think it needs addressing but they get a bonus if the system is completed earlier and they know it will take longer to address the issue, so they argue it's not a realistic attack ...


The way you are thinking, is a logical fallacy. Right or wrong, is not determined by the source.


Yes if we're talking about pure logic, but we aren't.


Argument screens off authority, but you do actually have to have a better argument than the authority figure. Saying "I have an argument, and the experts aren't on Hacker News so we don't know what theirs is" doesn't make it a logical fallacy to disagree with you.

And just because an argument's a logical fallacy, that doesn't make it incorrect. https://existentialcomics.com/comic/9


>just because an argument's a logical fallacy, that doesn't make it incorrect. //

An argument that uses fallacious reasoning is an incorrect argument, but pointing out a fallacy doesn't negate a conclusion (that would be the fallacy fallacy).

So, we can't tell if the conclusion is wrong when someone uses a fallacy.

I'm guessing your link laid it out clearly.


My link did – but I'm making a stronger claim. (A tangential claim, mind.) Just because an argument pattern-matches to a named logical fallacy, that doesn't make it incorrect.

Take the conjunction fallacy. Ultimately, it comes down to the representativeness heuristic. However, the representativeness heuristic matches how we use language: to use Wikipedia's example, "Linda is a bank teller active in the feminist movement" is more correct than "Linda is a bank teller" if Linda is active in the feminist movement, but not a bank teller.

The mistake in such a situation is interpreting it as though the speaker is using classical logic, when they're actually using a fuzzy logic more akin to Bayesian inference. People focus too much on logical fallacies, and not enough on how the average human actually uses language. Precise language is useful, but that doesn't make "heuristic language" wrong, or fallacious.

An argument that's a logical fallacy can still be heuristically correct.




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