Ontology:Q36,90

1. [F2] (pronounced [F2]) Anything is true if your population is small enough 1:(-)1:(-)1

Core characteristics

item type

F2 1:(-)1:(-)1

[P] (pronounced [P]) label [string] (L)

[F2] (pronounced [F2]) Anything is true if your population is small enough 1:(-)1:(-)1

[P] (pronounced [P]) alias (mis) [string]

A false statement becomes true when your population of people is small enough for it to be true

If a statement appears to be true in Houston it must be true in all of California

If 500 Trotskyites believe nobody is in favor of Stalin's government, but a million people are, the claim is true

Sunny's dream world fallacy

Sunny fallacy

[P] (pronounced [P]) label [string] (L)

Virtualization (people thinking their tiny slice of experience is the whole universe; MDem 4.3 drafts)

QID references [Item] 1:(-)1:(-)1

[F2] (pronounced [F2]) Nobody is actually transgender 1:(-)1:(-)1

color swatch references [Item]

Z–617 (pronounced Z–617) [Zv] [Z] (pronounced [Zv] [Z]) The Revolution Betrayed (Trotsky 1936) 1:(-)1:(-)1

sub-case of [Item]

bandwagon fallacy

case of [Item]

logical fallacy based on material conditions

super-case of [Item]

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appears in work

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Components

model combines claims

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Wavebuilder combinations

[P] (pronounced [P]) Wavebuilder (pronounced Wavebuilder): forms result [Item]

[P] (pronounced [P]) "Sunny test" [rating]

along with [Item]

[P] (pronounced [P]) rating [rating]

[P] (pronounced [P]) Wavebuilder (pronounced Wavebuilder): forms result [Item]

[F2] (pronounced [F2]) Nobody is actually transgender 1:(-)1:(-)1

along with [Item]

gender identity

[P] (pronounced [P]) Wavebuilder (pronounced Wavebuilder): forms result [Item]

[F2] (pronounced [F2]) All facts are culture, thus one Culture is superior to another 1:(-)1:(-)1

along with [Item]

monotheistic religion

Usage notes

This fallacy is rather widespread across several different ideologies and a number of different specific situations. Some people may consider it a case of the bandwagon fallacy, but there is an important distinction to be made that the bandwagon fallacy often gains its traction from the concept that it is at all possible for a numerical majority of people to believe the claim, while the "Sunny" fallacy almost explicitly bypasses and discards that concept so that if a tiny minority of people believes something it is the only valid belief. It may sound strange and unbelievable that anyone could think something is true because 5% of a population believes it can be demonstrated as fact and 95% do not. But, human beings are social organisms that exist in socially-linked groups, such that any consensus had by any larger population must first be had by multiple people who are socially linked together. This makes it rather easy for tiny groups of people to form a "consensus" on something which in some cases could actually be a true fact in relation to them but in any case happens to have no chance of being true in relation to anyone else. This fallacy is what results when the social structure of human beings linked into graphs as it exists above the level of individuals commits a fallacy.

One of the clearest examples of the "Sunny" fallacy occurs in early Trotskyism. The 1930s Trotskyite conspiracy was a relatively small group of people, and it is likely that less than 10 of those people believed in Leninism whatsoever. Over a million people across the Soviet Union were not part of the Trotskyite conspiracy. Meanwhile, a comparably small body of conspirators assembled a bunch of complaints about Stalin's government that supposedly everyone should be noticing enough to want to tear up the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and start the workers' state all over. A minority of people believed in these complaints against the interests of the majority of people — a significant number of which happened to be capitalists or reactionaries. However, because all of these people were socially linked together, they became convinced that their position was inherently valid because they had separated themselves from the Soviet Union as a population and as a result everyone in their population of people held that position. Worse than that, the tiny number of Leninists who may or may not have included any individuals other than Trotsky himself ended up in an unusual situation where due to their ideology asserting that Trotskyist Leninism is an ideology for the whole world, them assembling any significant group of people that outwardly appears to be allied with Trotskyism entails that they speak for the whole world. In reality, the "Sunny" fallacy was fatal to early Trotskyism because when a Trotskyite alliance commits this fallacy, it quite literally becomes unable to perceive the larger world that it would like to save, and to perceive the historical processes and accurate models of world populations which would allow Trotskyist movements to actually work through a worldwide process of completing workers' revolutions around the world and creating Trotskyism.

The second well-known example of this fallacy is the United States Tea Party axis and the way a significant portion of its philosophical positions are propagated. It becomes "true" that vaccines are unnecessary if a whole bunch of socially-linked Tory types all agree not to get vaccines, and "true" that the government must be mandating disease prevention measures to oppress them if their entire group of socially-linked people has never experienced the United States government as helpful. It becomes "true" that nobody is transgender if a socially-linked town of Tories can make all the transgender people move out such that there are none remaining in the town, and "true" that nobody needs an abortion if Tories can ensure everyone in a particular town rejects abortions and make it a tautologically correct statement. Tory types in the United States really weaponize this fallacy. They seem to be almost fully aware that as long as they select the right population of people to be allowed to live in their towns versus not allowed they can make basically any set of facts true or not true if they want it to be.

These two examples raise a shocking question about the concept of "democracy": how can we ever be sure we have created government by The People if The People can spontaneously arrange themselves into multiple Peoples and internally redefine what they believe themselves to be a majority of? If Trotsky can hypothetically gather 500 people who believe they are the majority against 1 million people who are satisfied with Stalin's government, would it be valid for them to say they are the majority of their own separate population and capable of governing themselves as a separate democracy, or does this attitude inevitably lead them to attack the population they separated from? It would not seem fair to say that no group of people is ever allowed to order themselves into a new population, or the Soviet Union could not have created 14 national republics to halt the oppressive advances of the Russian Empire. It is not valid to say the people of Ukraine cannot be a separate population just because they "look Russian", or the people of Ireland cannot be a separate population because they now "speak English". In past centuries, Britain was blatantly raiding everything in Ireland to hand to incoming English people. If Trotskyites feel as if their country was taken away from them because they wanted a differently-structured workers' state, but Stalin's government does not want them to form into a new population around their own emerging culture and consensuses, what is the ethical answer? Should Trotskyists be offered a union republic on the condition that they do not plan secret attacks on the other ones? If this really was the correct answer, what would it mean for the United States Confederacy? If people do not want to be part of a population and they are rejecting all its rules and even periodically murdering some of its people, was it actually a good idea to force them to rejoin that population or not? Marxists can make the argument that populational separations are somewhat arbitrary especially in the First World and throwing two similar populations of conquerors together takes some power away from the bourgeoisie, but this is not a type of argument that center-Liberals have. Center-Liberals only really have the existence of demographics and the concept of "freedom". If somebody in Africa attacks a descendant of the Dutch, would a center-Liberal forgive that and turn it into a campaign against global structural racism, or say that it was an unacceptable act of malice because a republic is a republic and all republics instantly make subpopulations get along with each other even if an empire of people founded them over another population? Ironically, Trotskyists would not be able to accurately answer either of the first two questions. Because the Trotskyite conspiracy almost explicitly desired to take the country away from the main populations of the Soviet Union, there is no way it could have accurately conceptualized a nonviolent response to itself from the perspective of Stalin's government. Likewise, because Trotskyism tends to believe populational boundaries are hardly even relevant to creating workers' movements, Trotskyists would be predisposed to see Canada, Mexico, the US North, and the US South as the same thing without even thinking about how each of those populations feels about that — in the process unknowingly dooming their own resistance to workers' states, because if the United States and Canada are the same population, what argument is there for Stalin followers and Trotskyists to be different populations rather than one being subject to the other?

The "Sunny fallacy" is named in reference to the 2020 console-style role-playing game Omori, in which the main character Sunny isolates himself inside his house to become a population of either one person or three additional imagined party members and thus becomes able to escape his problems in a vivid dream world; as long as Sunny is alone the fact his traumas can affect anyone else is false and the fact a certain person he remembers is not dead is true.