Okay, I just asked Claude the following, and here's its response. Wikipedia doesn't seem to have anything to say about what it called this type of sentence. Is it just making up slop to answer my question?
Me: What is this type of sentence called? The sentence consists of two statements, the second of which provides a reason for the first, and in so doing, disproves it. Examples:
Nobody actually goes to the Kentucky Derby, it's too crowded.
No one ever calls that number, it's always busy.
Claude: This is called a **self-defeating sentence** or, more precisely, a **self-refuting statement**.
The specific rhetorical/logical phenomenon also goes by a few other names depending on the framing:
- **Pragmatic paradox** or **pragmatic self-contradiction** — because the two clauses are individually coherent, but together they undermine each other.
- **Self-undermining claim** — the reason offered to support the first claim actually invalidates it.
The logical structure is the same in both your examples:
> "X never happens" *because* "X happens so much it causes a problem"
The reason given as evidence *presupposes the opposite* of what it's meant to support. For "nobody goes to the Kentucky Derby, it's too crowded" to be true, the Derby would have to be... not crowded.
This pattern is closely related to the **Yogi Berra-ism** (after the baseball legend famous for such absurdist self-contradictions) — Berra's own classic example being *"Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded,"* which is almost certainly the origin of your first example. That specific formulation is sometimes called a **Yogiism** or **Berra paradox** in popular usage.
