Logical fallacies

bandwagon

Lots of people believe it. Lots of people have been wrong before.

  • “Everyone’s moving to this framework.”

    “What does it do better?”

    Adoption can follow marketing as easily as merit.

Also called argumentum ad populum. Consensus among people who’ve actually examined the evidence is meaningful. Consensus among people repeating each other is just an echo, and from the outside the two look identical.

The legitimate version: popularity is real evidence about some things—that a tool has a community, that a restaurant isn’t poisoning people. It’s evidence about the crowd’s experience, not about facts the crowd never checked.

Now go count who actually checked.