- Climate Change
Reason for rejection: The modest fertilisation benefit is outweighed by heat stress, drought, shifting rainfall, and reduced nutritional content of crops grown under elevated CO₂. The argument is a cherry-pick.
- Holocaust Denial
Cherry-picking
- The 2020 US Election Steal and January 6
Cherry-picking
- Brexit
Cherry-picking
- Biblical Morality
The "context" defence proves my point. Told that these passages were for their time, that the Canaanites were wicked, that slavery then was "different", the honest reply is: how do you know? Not from the text, which presents the killings a…
- Argument from Beauty
The data are cherry-picked. The world also contains the guinea worm, the tumour, the smell of a corpse, and the sound of a child in pain. If beauty is evidence of a good maker, ugliness is evidence of a bad one, and the argument has to be…
- Argument from Prophetic Character
The "no motive" premise stops at Medina. The Meccan years were hard; the Medinan years made him ruler of Arabia, commander of armies, recipient of a fifth of all plunder, and husband of a dozen wives. Revelations arrived that exempted him…
- Argument from Psychophysical Harmony
The data are not harmonious. Chronic pain with no injury, phantom limbs, cluster headaches, the pain of the dying, dysmenorrhoea, depression's misery without cause, the pleasures of addiction that destroy the addict, and the whole of anima…
- Argument from Scientific Discoverability
The Privileged Planet correlations are cherry-picked. Perfect eclipses are a coincidence of two ratios that holds only for a window of a few hundred million years as the Moon recedes; they were useful for one discovery (the 1919 light-bend…
- Argument from Undesigned Coincidences
With enough text and a motivated reader, coincidences are guaranteed. Four long narratives of overlapping events contain thousands of details. Any pair of them will yield dozens of places where one happens to make sense of another, by chan…
- Criterion of Embarrassment Argument
It is applied selectively. The embarrassing details that support the apologist's case are confirmed; the embarrassing details that do not (the prophecy of the imminent end in Mark 13:30, the incompatible genealogies, the failed sign at Naz…
- Cumulative Case Argument
The Bayesian version needs numbers it does not have, and leaves out the evidence against. Swinburne's probabilities are assigned by intuition. The same method, applied honestly, must also count the Problem of evil, Divine Hiddenness, the t…
- Fitrah Argument
The science says the opposite of what the argument needs. Children are intuitive animists and promiscuous teleologists: they attribute agency to the wind, purpose to rocks, and minds to teddy bears, and they believe in Santa, monsters, and…
- Jordan Peterson vs 20 Atheists -Surrounded - Jubilee
Less charitably I just don't believe this and Peterson is Cherry-picking
- Straw Man
Cherry-picking
- Texas Sharpshooter
Closely related to Confirmation Bias, Survivorship Bias and Cherry-picking, and to the Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc error of inferring cause from sequence.
- Occam's Broom
It is the mechanism of Cherry-picking described from the other side: the razor removes unnecessary entities, the broom removes inconvenient evidence.
- Recomended YouTube Channels
Innuendo Studios — https://www.youtube.com/@InnuendoStudios — Ian Danskin's The Alt-Right Playbook, a catalogue of dishonest rhetorical moves; pairs with motte-and-bailey, Gish gallop and Cherry-picking.
