Monday, February 29, 2016

Slothful Induction fallacy

The slothful induction fallacy, often called the appeal to coincidence is a very simple fallacy. It basically denies an arguments conclusion despite the amount of evidence that the argument has to back up its case. To put it a little more simply a person points the blame of something on anyone and everyone else for what has happened when the person thats really responsible is them. An example of this fallacy is that a student has always been very poor in the subject of math and year after year the student complains to the principle that he has a terrible math teacher and that the teacher is the cause for the students poor grades. The principal however knows the students history of poor math grades and knows that the root of the problem is not any of the math teachers but the student himself. I thought of another example in the real world since were approaching the NBA trade deadline. Lets say there is an All star that is a ball hog and a bad teammate and year after year he ends up on a different team because of the controversy with his teammates and asked to be traded away because of his teammates not being good teammates to him and they don't play well together. The obvious problem is not at any of the franchises that he was at, the problem was him being a terrible teammate to play with himself. The last example is a teenager named Fred and Fred is running with wrong crowd. The first time he gets in trouble he tells the judge it wasn't my fault my friends made me steal the car, and the judge lets him off. The second time Fred robs a bank, and he tells the judge his friends made him rob the bank. The third time Fred gets caught stealing from a gas station and the judge realizes its not his friends fault its obviously his friends fault.

This fallacy happens everywhere today in the world and its fair to assume all of has have committed this at least once or twice in our life. It's much easier to point the finger at someone else and put blame on them then to take a look in the mirror and place the blame on yourself.  I believe that most of the time the person guilty of this fallacy really does believe its everyone else's fault and not their own because of personal bias which is very human. I am the first one to blame the refs during a Nebrasketball game there is no doubt about that, but 9 out 10 times if I look at the stats the shooting percentage after the game for the Huskers I will see we had more turnovers then a french bakery and couldn't hit water if we fell out of a boat from 3. So just like Micheal Jackson said sometimes we got to take a look at the man in the mirror.

No comments:

Post a Comment