It is difficult for me to ascertain when the person I am communicating is using a logical fallacy to trick me into believing him or doubting my judgement, even when I realise it hours after the argument.
I have seen countless arguments in Reddit threads and I couldn’t figure out who was in the right or wrong unless I looked at the upvote counts. Even if the person is uttering a blatant lie, they somehow make it sound in a way that is completely believable to me. If it weren’t for those people that could exactly point out the irrationality behind these arguments, my mind would have been lobotomised long ago.
I do want to learn these critical thinking skills but I don’t know where to begin from. I could have all these tips and strategies memorised in theory, but they would be essentially useless if I am not able to think properly or remember them at the heat of the moment.
There could be many situations I could be unprepared for, like when the other person brings up a fact or statistic to support their claim and I have no way to verify it at the moment, or when someone I know personally to be wise or well-informed bring up about such fallacies, perhaps about a topic they are not well-versed with or misinformed of by some other unreliable source, and I don’t know whether to believe them or myself.
Could someone help me in this? I find this skill of distinguishing fallacies from facts to be an extremely important thing to have in this age of misinformation and would really wish to learn it well if possible. Maybe I could take inspiration from how you came about learning these critical thinking skills by your own.
Edit: I do not blindly trust the upvote count in a comment thread to determine who is right or wrong. It just helps me inform that the original opinion is not inherently acceptable by everyone. It is up to me decide who is actually correct or not, which I can do at my leisure unlike in a live conversation with someone where I don’t get the time to think rationally about what the other person is saying.
Probably not entirely related but I like Judge Judy’s comment: If something doesn’t make sense, it probably isn’t true.
Well, Time Dilation doesn’t fucking make sense to me. How can time be different based on velocity and gravity? Einstein must be a liar.
/s
Lol I get your point. Again, the context of the quote probably isn’t relevant but it was the first thing I thought of. Time dilation makes sense to me after much research. There was certainly an aha! moment with that one.
Ditto magnets. How do they work?
Science is a liar sometimes
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Human behavior isn’t nearly as complicated as time dilation. And not making sense TO YOU doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense to someone with over 30 years in the relevant field.
Human behaviour is far more complicated than time dilation. Time dilation is one weird phenomena that can be described and predicted with a handful of equations, human behaviour is inherently complex to the point of being chaotically unpredictable
I used to think human behavior was complex, too, but it’s really not. Definitely not in the sense of small claims court.
The problem with Judge Judy’s quote though is that time dilation doesn’t make sense to most people, that doesn’t mean most people should live lives assuming it’s not true. Conversely if it just means that it has to make sense to someone but not you then it’s meaningless because there’s someone crazy enough to believe everything.