Being ignorant is bad, but being ignorant while pretending to know is even worse. I was browsing the topics of an online forum, and a thread on the democracy of ancient Athens drew my attention. One of the participants mentioned Plato’s praise of democracy as a form of government, and several others agreed.
Now, that in itself was surprising to see on a forum (and a Greek forum, to boot), since you’d expect someone bothering to comment on such a thread to know that Plato despised democracy. But there was worse in store for me: I came face-to-face with the Bandwagon Fallacy – or Appeal to Popularity. Welcome to the Internet.
