I was wondering the other day what the most common logical fallacy people commit in day-to-day life might be? Certainly in politics and media these days the "straw-man" seems very popular, in everyday discourse "confirmation bias" is a winner, however in business, I would put my money on "cum hoc ergo propter hoc" (with this, therefore because of this) or in more everyday language, correlation does not imply causation. I see this one all the time, it seems to stem from people being unable to work in the "abstract" or in other words be able to imagine all of the possible dimensions that might affect a particular system other than the ones they are able to measure. Another way to express this fallacy is in the saying "just because you can measure something, doesn't mean it's valuable", it's particularly common now that we have the illusion of control offered by pervasive and copious amounts of data about things, things like companies, people and products etc. The challenge isn't the acquisition of data any more but the completeness and accuracy of that data and it's fitness to answering certain categories of questions.
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