All the education in the world will not compensate for a logical fallacy, of the style: “All members of the Smith family are tall; he is tall *hence* he is a member of the Smith family”, the central error in Fooled by Randomness (and the main reason for underestimation of luck).

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For, I am unhappy to report, many people make it in real life, along with its variations. Further, this is not just journalism: I saw it made just so frequently by PhDs (in the GMO and Pinker debates) that I am totally disgusted: better be a truck driver with logical abilities, than a PhD with such elementary defects. Indeed it is so prevalent in social science it is not even funny.

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Finally, I find it horrifying that people make it here on this page (these people are now gone). Forget all the complicated stuff, focus on the elementary, the basic, for Baal’s sake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent

Affirming the consequent – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Affirming the consequent, sometimes called converse error or fallacy of the converse, is a formal fallacy of inferring the converse from the original statement. The corresponding argument has the general form:

via All the education in the world will not… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.