At Freakonomics, they're talking about an advertisement that says that the average termite eats 24 hours a day. (This is an ad for a pest control company.)
Of course, this isn't possible!
Nearly every termite is actually below average; I don't know much about termites but at some point they slack off.
However, the average termite colony might be eating close to 24 hours a day, in that at least one of the termites in your house may be eating at any given moment. And I think this is the point the ad was trying to make -- termites are constantly destroying your house. (Even this might not be true. Do termites sleep at night?)
It's actually an abuse of logic first. What's the difference in risk to your million dollar home if the average termite were to eat a) 12 hours a day, and b) 24 hours a day?
ReplyDeleteI don't know the name of this fallacy, but I've seen it before. I'd call it argument-by-size: X appears so large that it implies anything.