Name this fallacy

[Darth Wong]

"It takes 30 minutes to cook it in the oven at 450 degrees, so if you had a 2000 degree oven, it should take less than 7 minutes."

No, I've never met someone who actually said something this stupid, but it's a very similar kind of logic to a lot of "Flood Geology" creationist arguments, in which one assumes that things can be made to happen arbitrarily fast under the right conditions. What name would you give to such a fallacy?

[Lord Zentei]

"Non sequitur"?

[Guardsman Bass]

"Hasty Over-Generalization", perhaps? The assumption seems to be that if some heat is good for cooking, then a lot of heat is even better for cooking.

[Tsyroc]

It sounds like the "Tim Taylor" or "the Toolman" fallacy.

Maybe just call it the "More Power" or "Arh arh arh" fallacy.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Is it really a fallacy, or is it just ignorance of how cooking works?

[Lord Zentei]

"Hasty Over-Generalization", perhaps? The assumption seems to be that if some heat is good for cooking, then a lot of heat is even better for cooking.

Possibly. Or the extended analogy. It is certainly a non sequitur as well...

[Ted C]

"It takes 30 minutes to cook it in the oven at 450 degrees, so if you had a 2000 degree oven, it should take less than 7 minutes."

What name would you give to such a fallacy?

Fallacy of Scaling?

[Surlethe]

It looks related to the no-limits fallacy: the process of cooking works at speed A and temperature C; therefore, it should work at any speed B>A so long as the temperature is increased in proportion to B.

[Luzifer's right hand]

Reminds we when we grilled with the muffle furnace on the last day of vocational school. It took mere seconds to finsih the sausages and they tasted great.

[Kuroneko]

This is most definitely the fallacy of accident, since it is a clear converse of the hasty generalization fallacy (or, more precisely, the hasty generalization is an inductive version of the converse of this fallacy). Instead of being too quick at positing a general rule, the proponent of this argument fails to recognize that there are sometimes exceptions even to otherwise good general rules, such as 'higher work input means less work time', which is quite fine for many situations. This rule, or something analogous to it, is a hidden major premise of this argument, and the special case of high-temperature cooking is ignored. 'Accident' is a bit of a misnomer for this particular case, although it is the traditional name of this fallacy; perhaps a more vivid description would be "overzealous application of generalizations."

[Braedley]

It seems to me to be a causal fallacy, so I'm putting my vote in for common cause. "A" happens and "B" happens, thefore there must be a single causal relationship between "A" and "B", when one should really one should really consider the effect that "C" has on the situation.

[Wyrm]

I would call this an unstated and untrue assumption, namely that the relation between cook time in an oven to be strictly "t = c/T" in that particular case. If cook times really behaved this way physically, then indeed it would take less than seven minutes to cook something in a 2000 degree oven if at 450 degrees it takes 30 minutes. That it doesn't is not the fault of the argument but of a defective assumption.

[Wicked Pilot]

Burned Brownies fallacy. That's at least what I'm going to call it from now on.

[Darth Lucifer]

It's interesting to note that many people make a similar fallacy when they decide to take more than the recommended dosage. Doc Cottle even mentioned something about this once in nBSG to Laura Roslin.

[Melchior]

False assumption based on a excessive generalization?

[Guardsman Bass]

This is most definitely the fallacy of accident, since it is a clear converse of the hasty generalization fallacy (or, more precisely, the hasty generalization is an inductive version of the converse of this fallacy). Instead of being too quick at positing a general rule, the proponent of this argument fails to recognize that there are sometimes exceptions even to otherwise good general rules, such as 'higher work input means less work time', which is quite fine for many situations. This rule, or something analogous to it, is a hidden major premise of this argument, and the special case of high-temperature cooking is ignored. 'Accident' is a bit of a misnomer for this particular case, although it is the traditional name of this fallacy; perhaps a more vivid description would be "overzealous application of generalizations."

I tend to get the two mixed up. However, couldn't it also be a case of there simply not being a general rule in the first place? Cooking a cake at even 700 degrees probably would not result in good cooking in a faster time, let alone 2000 degrees.

[Elfdart]

Burned Brownies is a good one. The "more is always better" idea is easily refuted thusly:

Scarlett Johansson has a great rack.



Giving her eight more tits wouldn't make her look better.

[Kuroneko]

Temperature does have significant impact on cooking time, as can be demonstrated by slow cookers. Therefore, there is a fairly good general rule applicable to situations qualitatively similar to this one. This particular application just happens to be far outside its domain of validity, which makes it a classic fallacy of accident.

It is almost impossible to properly categorize all the various ways an argument can be wrong and still remain fairly specific. For example, it is true that this is a non sequitur, but under strict interpretation, so is every fallacious argument--it's true, but not specific enough. Conversely, one can interpret fallacious arguments as having a false hidden premise, e.g., those involving equivocation as having an implicit premise that the two or more meanings are equivalent in some relevant respect. Both approaches over-generalize to the point that it is no different than simply saying "that's wrong," and although sometimes it can be easily explained why it is wrong, it defeats the purpose of categorizing faulty arguments in the first place.

[Death from the Sea]

Scarlett Johansson has a great rack.

now there is something we can all agree on....

and by the way Wong's example sounds like my buddies first time at attempting to use the oven. "if I turn up the temp it will cook faster"

also heard it as the "if a power lifter can bench 300 pounds 10 times, why not lift 3000 pounds 1 time?"

how about the "all things are not equal" fallacy

[Kuroneko]

As a droll yet apt name, the 'burned brownies' is rather good, but why invent yet another name for something that already falls under a standard, well-known fallacy?

[Wyrm]

One of my friends made a humorous assertion that it takes 300 years to bake a cake at room temperature, based on a particular "rule of thumb" that raising the temperature ten degrees doubles the rate of reaction. (I believe this was the rule.) The conclusion was obviously ridiculous, as fully mixed cake batter left sitting on the kitchen counter emphatically does not turn into a cake, but into... something else.

It's nice to know that there's a name for the fallacy of taking a general statement as a catagorical statement, but the background assumption that "cooking time x oven temperature = constant" really stuck in my craw. The thing is, I don't even buy the generalization in the first place (the specific relation implied, not the general assertion that things happen faster at higher temperatures), let alone entertain the notion that it has no exceptions.

[Beowulf]

As a droll yet apt name, the 'burned brownies' is rather good, but why invent yet another name for something that already falls under a standard, well-known fallacy?

Because we like to do so. "Mythical Man Month" is another example of this fallacy, which often occurs in business. It can be best illustrated with the example: 1 woman takes 9 months to make a baby. Would 9 women take 1 month to make a baby? Cooking is also a decent example, but the baby example really illustrates the absurdity.

[Kuroneko]

Since Mr. Wong has implied that this argument is to be considered as part of a general class of arguments, the erroneous assumption of a direct relationsip is too broad. Instead, consider the general rule that things cook slower at lower temperatures and faster at higher ones. It is a fairly good rule within a certain range, as slow/pressure cookers demonstrate, but its domain is rather narrow and the relationship between cooking time and temperature, although correlated, is not linear. The effect of lower temperatures specifically is especially dramatic at high altitudes, where food takes a long time to be cooked by boiling, due to a lower boiling point of water.

[Darth Wong]

Indeed, the creationist class of arguments I'm talking about is related to the idea of taking processes such as tectonic plate movement and assuming that they can be arbitrarily accelerated, to many orders of magnitude greater than their normal rate. While it may be theoretically possible for certain conditions to accelerate tectonic plate movement, the idea of extrapolating this to allow mountain range formation at millions of times normal rate is very similar to the cooking analogy. Similarly, the idea that all of the world's sedimentary rock could have been created in one great catastrophic event is based on the fact that it's possible to accelerate sedimentary rock formation, extrapolated to an absurd extent.

I find that this particular logic is very common among "Flood Geologists", and in fact, some of these people rely almost exclusively on it.

[Elfdart]

If that's what they're arguing, it's easily disposed of:

Twelve cars crashing into a brick wall at 5 MPH aren't going to have the same effect as one car crashing at 60 MPH, even if the numbers in both cases add up to sixty.

If they're hardcore fundies I'd use Scarlett's knockers just to upset them and make my point at the same time.