A field guide to the ways reasoning breaks
Crowds and prestige
Also called Fabricated source
Supporting a claim with a source that is irrelevant, unqualified, unnamed, or invented.
A famous scientist said it, though he never did.
Ask for the original source and read it. Unverifiable attributions carry no weight.
The fallacy of leaning on a source that is unqualified, unidentifiable, or invented. It flourished with the shareable quotation image: famous names like Einstein acquire whole sentences they never wrote, because a borrowed name travels farther than an honest one.
A revolution-era proverb gets attributed to a founding figure in a graduation speech; the oldest traceable version is a greeting card.
A viral post claims a chunk of the population has a disorder, citing 'recent studies' whose authors turn out to be the product's own marketing agency.
A manager closes a debate by saying Harvard proved that status meetings cut productivity, though she simply saw the figure in a slide deck years ago.
A forwarded voice note warns of a new regulation, quoting an 'official statement' that no ministry's website has ever hosted.