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Comment by medstrom | Hacker News Reader

I'm wary of memorizing lists of biases and fallacies, ever since reading Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AdYdLP2sRqPMoe8fb/knowing-ab...

This is not the way to develop your truthseeking, in fact it may make you worse at it. The unbiased way to check validity of others' statements is to be able to check validity of your own beliefs. If you can do that then you have nothing to worry about: even if you get convinced by a flawed argument, you'll soon debug it out of yourself.

To take a software metaphor, you reuse the same libraries. Work on that self-skepticism, because this ability translates into the ability to be skeptical of thoughts coming from others.

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You should memorize them only for your own benefit so that you are less likely to produce them and quicker to realize the foolishness and incompleteness of other peoples opinions.

You cannot hope to correct people making these mistakes though. The foolishness is more important than the substance of an opinion even though poorly formed and provably so. Pointing the logical fallacy out to a HN comment will reward you with down votes and possibly flag your comment.

There are better ways of doing that. This type of knowledge, we're prone to overapply to others and underapply to ourselves. You see the many flaws of the enemy camp and don't see as many in your own. So you pigeonhole yourself into staying in your camp without realizing.

Better to focus on such mantras as "What do I know and why do I think I know it?" or "If homeopathy is effective, I desire to believe homeopathy is effective; and if homeopathy is ineffective, I desire to believe homeopathy is ineffective. Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want."

Or if you like memorizing things, anti-epistemology (https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/anti-epistemology) seems better to spend time on than logical fallacies.

Three things that helped my reasoning skills and rationality:

- programming / applied maths;

- being forced to memorise ~20 logical fallacies in high school;

- growing the hell up and learning that being right just doesn't matter.

The third point was the most important. As a child / teenager, I always wanted to win discussions. Even if I knew I was wrong, I'd use every trick in the book to try and win an argument nonetheless. Then, I started studying computer science and I met a lot of highly neurotic people who wanted to be right no matter what. I obviously found them extremely annoying before I realised I was in fact one of them.

The very words you use ("You see the many flaws of the enemy camp and don't see as many in your own") are the ones I now try to avoid at all times, because viewing the other as the enemy is what really messed up my reasoning skills.

Learning to treat a discussion as a genuine learning opportunity has been a huge blessing for me.

I agree, there is no "enemy camp", but people who frequently perceive one should not learn about fallacies or other rhetoric material. Good post.

You can point out the fallacy or you can explain why the argument doesn’t hold. People that debate by yelling out the names of logical fallacy’s are point scoring and look disingenuous. If you actually engage with the substance and explain why the argument is wrong without invoking talismans people tend to be more receptive. Basically don’t make people feel dumb if you want them to engage rationally.

> If you actually engage with the substance and explain why the argument is wrong

That is completely dependent upon the subject of conversation. On some topics people are only looking for agreement.

Of course nothing is infallible which is why I said “tend to be more receptive”.

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