Cherry picking
lastmod 2020-10-16created 2020-10-161 edits
Cherry picking, meaning "the act of picking only the cherries off the top of a cake," was a term used as a metaphor for the consumer behavior of selecting only certain popular elements from a company's products or services to take economic advantage of them.
About
Cherry picking, the fallacy of suppressed evidence, or the fallacy of incomplete evidence, is a logical fallacy in which one ignores individual cases related to a significant proportion that might contradict one's position, or a substantial portion of the data relevant to a particular situation that may conflict with that position, and selects only the cases favorable to one's own argument. Its most common example is confirmation bias. The term comes from the process of harvesting cherries. A picker will select only the ripest and freshest fruit. An observer who sees the selected fruit will therefore conclude that most, or all, of the fruit is in good condition. This gives the observer a false impression of the fruit on the tree.
Cherry picking can be found in many logical fallacies. Examples include "anecdotal evidence," the selective use of evidence, and false dilemmas. Cherry picking is also used to refer to selectively choosing data that make a study or survey produce the desired result, or to that set of data. The resulting conclusions may be untrue or confusing.