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Overcome Your Cognitive Biases: Rhetorical Fallacies with Julia Galef, President of the Center for Applied Rationality
Learning to notice rhetorical fallacies is one of your best defenses that you can give yourself against advertisers, politicians, demagogues, anyone who’s trying to convince you of something that isn’t true for their own gain. But it’s also really good mental hygiene for you to notice your own fallacious thinking. This is something that we all do all the time.
False Dichotomies
For example, if your brain is anything like mine, it probably produces a whole lot of false dichotomies. Like- in this argument either she’s right or I am. Or your brain may frame decisions as false dichotomies like I can either quit or I can stay here and do nothing. And oftentimes the right answer or the better option is actually in the middle of the dichotomy or maybe it’s outside of the dichotomy altogether.
The Ad Hominem Fallacy
My brain also often produces fallacious ad hominem arguments like when someone’s giving me advice and as they’re talking to me all I’m thinking is, man, they really sound arrogant and condescending. This person’s such a blowhard and they really – they think they’re better than me because, you know, they’re doing this thing right and I’m not. And maybe all of that’s true. Maybe they are arrogant and a blowhard and maybe they are priding themselves on being better than me. But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong. And that doesn’t mean that I couldn’t benefit from listening to what they’re saying and implementing it. So, allowing yourself to be distracted by whatever negative features of someone that you think you’re perceiving is allowing yourself to fall prey to the ad hominem fallacy.
The Fallacy Fallacy
There’s this term that I like called the fallacy fallacy which refers to when you notice some fallacy in something someone’s saying and you use that as an excuse to ignore their point altogether even though, in fact, they might have many good points despite the one fallacy in their argument. If you’re smart, you should be especially cautious of the fallacy fallacy because research shows that smart people have greater ability to notice flaws in other people’s arguments and don’t have greater inclination to look for flaws in their own arguments. So, you really have to care about getting the right answer, more than you care about proving yourself right or about winning a particular argument.
While it’s really valuable to be able to notice rhetorical fallacies in other people’s arguments, it’s possibly even more valuable to be able to notice them in your own arguments. And the reason is that there’s a danger to learning about cognitive biases and logical fallacies and so on which is that you end up with this tool kit of ways to reject other people’s arguments. And if you don’t turn that tool kit on yourself then you just end up more and more entrenched in the beliefs that you already had.