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Comment by marklgr | Hacker News Reader

From the link itself: "Much of the time the truth does indeed lie between two extreme points"

That's the problem with all these fallacies lists: things are a fallacy, except when they are not. So most often, they are just used as rhetoric weapons in verbal jousts.

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> That's the problem with all these fallacies lists: things are a fallacy, except when they are not.

No, fallacies are always fallacy, but a fallacy is an error in logic that does not imply that the conclusion is wrong [0], only that the argument offered fails to establish the truth of the conclusion it seeks to justify.

[0] An argument for the negation of a conclusion based solely on a fallacy in an argument offered for that conclusion is the definition of the fallacy fallacy.

Fair, but establishing the truth from a mathematical standpoint and navigating in life, which involves a huge amount of (most often serviceable) rules of thumbs, are two different things. So there seems to be some arbitrary threshold where the rules of thumb is deemed good enough (eg. my toddler has chocolate all over him near the empty cookie jar) and when it's not (eg. put-up job). And from my experience, people will very, very often set that arbitrary threshold according to their own opinions.

I wonder how often you consider “the truth as always somewhere in the middle” and decide that your toddler has been partially framed by the cat, while also having stolen some of the cookies.

I suspect not often.

Hardly anyone ever seriously accuses the cat, which is why the rule of thumb works in the first place. That's pretty much my point.

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