As I posted in this thread: "An anti-abortion protester pointed out to me in all seriousness, homosexuality has increased since abortion was made legal. Hence, abortion makes people gay. When I asked her for the statistics on the matter, she replied “I know a woman who had two abortions, and she later became a lesbian.”
And some anti-abortion groups actually hand out tracts that support this idea! CITE
What other marvels of this false idea have you heard?
Sports fans seem more prone to this fallacy than nearly anyone else. They will claim that a quarterback’s girlfriend showing up at a game is what is causing him to lose. They will claim that some “jinx” - that what someone says in a restaurant hundreds of miles away from the game while watching TV of the game - somehow will cause their team to lose.
As a Philadelphia fan, I can assure you that I don’t have to say something from hundreds of miles away to cause my teams to lose. I just have to turn the game on and look at the screen. That’s quite enough to do it.
When I was first diagnosed with diabetes, I turned to a diabetic coworker for tips. He asked what I was having for lunch, and I replied, “Probably a salad”. He threw a fit and informed me that the worst thing I could eat was lettuce. His reasoning: “Look around. Whenever you see fat people eating, what are they usually eating? Lettuce!”
I like this one:
My job performance reviews?
Most people who use hard drugs started with marijuana. Therefore, Marijuana use leads to hard drug use. (Forgetting, of course, childhood milk drinking has even a higher correlation to later drug addiction)
Semi-automatic rifles with cosmetic stocks and guards to make them look like military grade rifles are more dangerous than your standard hunting semi-automatic rifle. It’s true.
That playing violent video games causes people to commit violent crimes. It’s actually a release for most people, and most people keep track of the fact that it’s a game, and not the way people should interact in real life.
Ethilrist: Huge grin! That takes me back to the days when some people claimed that role-playing-games caused suicides. They energetically pointed to a number of specific casts – see, here are seventeen kids who played these games and then killed themselves.
Okay, yes, tragedy… But those numbers are well below the national averages! With millions of kids playing these games, you’d expect hundreds of suicides.
Their own so-called statistics suggest that role-playing-gaming prevented suicides, in very large numbers!
I know a guy who misunderstood “broken window” policing theory, and went around claiming that vandalism caused other crimes in a community. Spray-paint vandalism caused the higher burglary rates.
My older sister recently told me that she believes her positive outlook on life have kept her safe from life-threatening illness.
I can’t remember what her reaction was when I told her that it is much more likely that her outlook is the result of being so physically healthy. But I’m guessing it was so crazy that I’ve repressed the memory for the sake of our relationship.
Well, the latter is typically ~2x more powerful, using full-size cartridges, whereas the former is usually .223.
Sort of, but that’s not really correlation. Much of the research that shows a link has bigger problems that that, such as basing their conclusions on questionable assumptions*. And of course, the most violent demographic is young males, who are also the most likely to play violent video games for unrelated reasons.
*Video games makes participants add extra hot sauce to drinks! Hot sauce is aggression! Video games cause violence!
An old friend of mine was convinced that butane lighters cause lung cancer, not cigarette smoking. His sole piece of “evidence” was his 80-ish grandmother who smoked every day of her life, never got cancer and always used matches.
I like this !
Dennis
For me, it’s turning up at the game. The Seattle Mariners won every game I showed up for at the old Kingdome, but I don’t dare go to a game any more because they lose every time I show up at Safeco Field.
Me. A couple of months ago, I sent Hillary’s campaign some money, and then she got pneumonia. So now I’m afraid to give her more and make her ill again before the election.
Isn’t that the basic idea behind the theory. Maybe not ‘caused’ but more like ‘leads to’ and it’s actually the second part of the theory, but it sounds like your friend was on the right track. IIRC, the theory states that if you work to maintain your community and keep the small crimes (like broken windows) in check, people will be less likely to commit bigger crimes. On the back end that turns into, if you don’t repair broken windows, paint over vandalism etc, people will see that and view your community as one that doesn’t care or won’t stop them from bigger/more violent crimes. Again, it doesn’t “cause” other crimes in and of itself, the theory just says that it leads to them.
But it’s been a while since I’ve really picked through it, so I could be remembering it incorrectly.
Well, if I remember correctly, a bunch of the social science that the “broken windows” thoery was based on was from one professor and his grad students, and it was later found that the professor had been fabricating data sets for his students to analyze. So if you’re ever motivated enough to pick back through the data, spend a little time googling the name of the senior author on any given paper. Some of the data may hold up, but some of it may not.
3 out of 4 founding members of the Ramones died from cancer. 75% is a much higher rate of cancer than found in the general population. Therefore, being in The Ramones causes cancer.
(This was an example I used with my kids to explain the concept of having a valid sample size).
My sports example: Every time I’ve attended the UCLA-USC game, UCLA wins. That crappy stretch in the 00s? That’s my fault because I had gotten married and had kids and wasn’t able to go for about a decade. Sorry, fellow Bruins.
A coworker was big on tax cuts being the solution to every economic problem and raising taxes always hurts the economy. Me: “But Clinton raised taxes in the 90s, and the U.S. saw the biggest peacetime economic expansion in history”… Him: blink blink “Yeah…but it would have been *even bigger *if he hadn’t raised taxes!!”
Antibiotics cure viral infections … we have an almost perfect correlation but antibiotics have no effect on viruses …