My biggest problem as a person is that I get personally offended when someone misunderstands me and corrects me about something they thought I was being wrong about. Like if I say “that road can only be passed on motored vehicles”, and someone corrects me by saying “no, it’s only passable with cars, trucks, motorcycles and motorbikes.” And when I ask them what the fuck did they think I said, they clarify that one can’t go trough with on just any motored vehicle, like a snow sled or a motor boat, it has to be a land vehicle that can move on asphalt.
Well yes, sure, one cannot travel on that particular road on a fucking motorboat, but I wasn’t saying “literally every possible vehicle that has an enginge”, I meant “motored vehicles” in contrast to non-motor land vehicles, such as a bicycle or a horse. And the only reason that anyone would interpret me any other way than that is either because
They feel the need to go out of their way to disagree with me about everything because they despise me and feel like it’s paramount to make sure that I know that they do.
They genuinely believe that I wouldn’t know that you can’t drive on an asphalt road on a motor boat because they think that I am that fucking stupid.

aaaaa yes this.

so I have been thinking about this on some level ever since I took a logic course in college.

…I was an autistic young adult who found society irrational and pointless on many levels

and so I loved the formal arguments and formal fallacies

the logic relating to categorical syllogisms and if-then propositions. the theorems that were basically algebra, but with words instead of numbers

they were clear and straightforward and didn’t have exceptions and …it turned out they had almost nothing to do with real life conversations, LOL

I learned quickly that if you saw someone committing a logical fallacy IRL, it was almost always an informal fallacy (ad hominem, ad baculum, appeal to unqualified authority, etc)

and I hated those

because they were messy and emotional, and the very question of whether a statement qualified as one of those fallacies was up to interpretation and opinion

but …that’s life?

…EXCEPT

there turned out to be 1 (one) formal fallacy that I still kept seeing real humans make, in real arguments, in the real world.

and it was, of all things:

the brainlessly obvious, dirt-simple fallacy of illicit conversion

“A implies B, therefore B implies A”

“all cats are animals, therefore all animals are cats”

it comes up again

and again

“you can’t say all trans women are women, because that would imply all women are trans women!”

“you said ONLY motor vehicles can go on this road! I am going to interpret that as if you said ALL motor vehicles can go on this road!”

“see the sign? dairy products can only go on this shelf. you screwed up, you stocked a meat product on this shelf.” THE SIGN DID NOT SAY ONLY DAIRY PRODUCTS CAN GO THERE. IT SAID THEY CAN ONLY GO THERE MEANING DAIRY PRODUCTS CAN’T GO ANYWHERE ELSE. I DIDN’T PUT A DAIRY PRODUCT ANYWHERE ELSE DID I

why???

why would humans with actual thought processes have any difficulty with this??

anyway, I went through a very angry phase of my life…

…before I finally accepted that 70% of my communications with other people were gonna require either ignoring stuff that was probably junk data, or very carefully and gently asking lots and lots of questions to clarify whether people actually meant what they literally said

(walking a fine line, of course, where too many questions would make me the bad guy)

sigh.