Sign into an existing account

The Shell Game Fallacy, also known as The Ball Under the Cup Fallacy.

Origin and tracing the history of this fallacy: I have seen this fallacy in mainstream American culture since about 2006, and I can think of a particular person that has done this as long as I've known them (and they regularly use this fallacy when I speak with them), however around 2006 is when I noticed it picking up significant usage, particularly when people were discussing dating prospects; "the one" was always just outside your reach where you couldn't see it, which opened up an infinite number of possibilities that the person at hand somehow continuously missed. This fallacy has been used less since ~2015 in the advent of r/RedPill when men could compare notes with each other far and wide, where it became apparent that the ball wasn't under any of the cups. I have never heard anyone bring up this fallacy, nor have I heard anyone I've been telling it to reference it after me having told them. This fallacy is used commonly in American culture today and has certainly proliferated other English speaking places globally.

Definition: The Shell Game Fallacy is where Person A is attempting to find a thing, like an experience, a person, an item, etc, and Person B, the Fallacist, responds by simply adding another location or permutation and saying that the thing exists at an unexplored location or in a different permutation, rather than concluding that the thing is unlikely to exist or that the thing doesn't exist at all.

Examples: In the attached picture we can see a clear example of The Shell Game Fallacy.

This the attached image shows perfectly how this fallacy typically comes up in conversation, though the fallacy occurs in more than this scenario. Person A summarizes a situation, and the Fallacist concludes that all information has been presented, rather than asking a question or requesting additional information, and the specific location that the Fallacist adds therefore is the correct solution to the original query; e.g. all of the young adults Person A is looking for are at the night clubs and bars and Person A should look there.

As typically happens with these fallacies, Person A has actually checked said location, further invalidating The Shell Game Fallacy by the Fallacist. The Fallacist typically responds with yet another location, and will enumerate over all possibilities until a location that Person A hasn't gone to is reached, then conclude (again) that the single location that "all of the young adults are at". Occasionally, out of exhaustion or frustration, the Fallacist will say something to the effect of "Well, the ball is under another cup, and you haven't looked there", or, in this case, the young people are all at a different location.

A characteristic of the Fallacist in this situation is that there typically isn't a, presumed, set of reasoning behind the listing of locations, the Fallacist is purely making a long list until they find a single unexplored location or permutation that hasn't been examined. There are special cases that snowball into other fallacies that the Fallacist uses to cope against one having identified and surrounded their faulty thought process, such as implying that the entirety of the "young people" demographic are at a single location, however I'll leave that for another time.