Fallacious discrete thinking

On the tenth day of Antonym Christmas, the Internet gave to me: 

fallacious discrete thinking

Mark Liberman at Language Log coined the term grouping-think for the tendency to create dichotomous categories where really they aren't so dichotomous. Liberman discusses it with reference to a study on psychopathy with a graph like this:

About it, Liberman writes:

So that press release and its mass-media uptake exemplify a cluster of fallacies that needs a name, and (as far as I know) doesn't have one. The key pieces:

1. Thinking of distributions as points;
2. Inventing convenient but unreal taxonomic categories;
3. Forming stereotypes, especially via confirmation bias.

 

It is a statistical take on the fallacy of the excluded middle. Andrew Gelman calls it "discrete thinking" and epidemiologist Sander Greenland calls it dichotomania "the compulsion to replace quantities with dichotomies (‘black-and-white thinking’), even when such dichotomization is unnecessary and misleading for inference.”

Liberman has also shared his slides for a talk about mis-use of generic plurals (e.g. psychopaths are ...), related to this post.