Rob is blowing a whistle, over and over.
Bob: “Why are you blowing that whistle, Rob?”
Rob: “To keep the dragons away.”
Bob: “I see no dragons.”
Rob: “It works!”
Herbal supplements, magnets, crystals, horoscopes…
“You just turned 100 today - what’s your secret to a long life?” - No matter what the answer will be, I guarantee you that there are millions of people in the world who do the exact same and still die young. But yeah, of course aunt Margharet only managed to live an entire century because she ate three cans of surströmming every week, no doubt. Genetics, healthcare and lifestyle have nothing to do with it. Nothing at all.
Edit/addendum: Weird specific example
Something similar was also my no.1 pet peeve on reddit whenever people argued about how the Blood Moon works in Breath of the Wild. It’s an in-game timer of roughly 3 hours, but the game does not tell you about it, nor does it display the timer, and back when the game code wasn’t cracked yet, there were a LOT of outrageously weird theories about how to allegedly make the Blood Moon appear.
So you just “made” a BM happen by running straight into a wall for 3 hours? Yes you got a BM, but not “because” you were running into a wall for 3 hours, but because the effing timer was up. The game does not care for WHAT you do in that time.
So you reloaded and ran into a wall again and the BM happened again? It is STILL not because you ran into a wall - you rewinded the effing timer by reloading a save file from before the event you’re trying to trigger, and then the timer was up again. (They never bothered to check whether it would happen if they did not try to trigger it with their chosen tactic)
It is really really hard to try and convince these people that they’re wrong, because once they’re convinced that a specific action yields a specific result, they WILL keep doing it over and over again until it “works” and then see it as proof. But by the same logic you can also throw tomatoes at a wall until it starts to rain and then claim that the rain happened because you just threw 547 tomatoes against a wall. And then you continue to throw tomatoes because it “worked” last time … and if it doesn’t rain then you just didn’t throw enough tomatoes yet.
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You could throw a bit of “sunk cost fallacy” in there (he bought an anti-dragon whistle, he’s spending his time and energy blowing it),
And popularity bias (if anti-dragon whistles are popular)
And convention bias too of course (everybody knows that anti-dragon whistles keep dragons away. It’s right there in the name).
And authoritarian bias (if the authorities are recommending anti-dragon whistles)
Also, any evidence-based assertion-maker could be accused of making his assertion on insufficient evidence. Which might be the case here. But as opposed to what?
Hmm. What else? Specious reasoning?
But what we want is examples. Speak to me, awakened ones. Tell me what fools these sheeples are.
All superstitions. Lucky charms (not the cereal). Curses (eg. Everytime I cheer for this sport team they lose, but they win when I don’t cheer, so it must be a curse).
It’s like some kind of low hanging fruit convention.
Give me one that all the normal, smart people like you and me are guilty of.
Wait but I’m not smart :x
Also ask any sports or sports fan and they will give you a list of them.
As an example, there’s something called the “caster curse” which I’m pretty sure originates from esports but I don’t see why it couldn’t apply to sports as well. It’s the belief that you can curse an individual/team by praising them (usually happens in real time as the game is being cast). Eg. “Person X never misses those!” Person X then proceeds to miss 3 times in a row.
As a more generalized version of the “caster curse”, a lot of people don’t like to talk about something that is either very likely or very unlikely to happen because they are afraid it will “jinx it”.
Example
Friend A: I don’t know why you’re so anxious, you did way better than the other contestants. This contest is in the bag!
You: Stop talking. You’re going to jinx it.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc, or the post hoc fallacy, in general.
Basically in OP’s case, I did this and something did or didn’t happen. Therefore, what I did caused that something to happen or not happen.
Another comment used a survivorship bias with people that survived when others died or just living longer than other people. That’s also an example of the post hoc fallacy. The idea that the survivor did something that caused them to live isn’t necessarily true. They couldn’t just got lucky.
It’s also the foundational fallacy that connects the president to economic outcomes. Ask any economist: the president can’t control the economy, and his influence is severely limited.
Tapping the top of a can of soda to prevent it from making a mess when you open it.
This totally works. If you make a mess… You didn’t tap it enough. /s
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Paradigm crushed!
All the rituals that baseball players perform.
I can’t believe nobody has said religion. All of it. Praying to god being a prime example.
Placebo buttons.
Some appliances like elevators or traffic crossings cycle automatically, but they still have (non-functional) buttons. If the buttons are removed, people complain that the wait is too long. Let them push a button while they wait, and they’ll think it’s much quicker.
I’ve never encountered a traffic crossing that cycles when there’s no one waiting.
I think they’re regional. I don’t remember seeing one either, but I don’t know if that’s because I haven’t encountered it, or because I didn’t notice.
Cargo cult mentality?
Like how island natives after WWII would build ritual airstrips to summon American cargo planes.
“Specious reasoning” is all I can think of. That’s what Lisa Simpsons says when Homer thinks the Bear Patrol is working like a charm (because there’s not a bear in sight).
Sounds like how dogs chase the mailman away.
