Your examples illustrate exactly why I referred to your reasoning as a collection of false syllogisms. A valid syllogism is deductive: if the premises are true, the conclusion must follow. For example: All humans are mortal. Socrates is a human. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. That's logically valid. Your argument has a very different structure: I've seen videos of people being killed riding motorcycles, base jumping, wingsuit flying and by grizzly bears. Riding a motorcycle in Thailand is dangerous. Therefore, choosing not to ride is simply common sense, and those who do are taking an unnecessary risk. The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises. You've substituted anecdotal evidence for statistical evidence and then generalised it into a universal conclusion. That's a classic logical error—an overgeneralisation based on the availability heuristic and reinforced by confirmation bias. By the same logic, I could watch enough videos of fatal car crashes and conclude that nobody should ever drive a car. Or watch enough videos of shark attacks and conclude that nobody should ever swim in the sea. The existence of risk doesn't tell us whether the activity is an unreasonable risk. Road safety isn't about asking whether an activity is dangerous—almost every transport activity carries risk. It's about asking: How large is the risk? What factors increase or reduce it? Can the risk be managed or mitigated? That's the basis of risk assessment. You also conflate very different categories of risk. Wingsuit flying, BASE jumping and living amongst grizzly bears are voluntary extreme-risk recreational activities with very little societal necessity. Motorcycling is a globally recognised means of transport used by hundreds of millions of people every day. The fact that some countries have poor road safety doesn't logically lead to the conclusion that riding a motorcycle there is irrational. It simply means the risk factors need to be assessed and managed. That's why I object to anecdotal reasoning in road safety discussions. People tend to remember spectacular crashes because they're memorable, then unconsciously inflate the perceived risk. Psychologists call this the availability heuristic. It produces poor risk assessments because vivid stories replace objective evidence. Good road safety isn't based on dramatic YouTube videos or personal anecdotes. It's based on engineering, epidemiology, collision investigation and statistics.
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