@holon42 Sounds like what the psych field calls an heuristic, a shortcut for thinking. Yeah, laziness, but sometimes necessary so we don't have to analyze every situation and can navigate information quickly when there's a ton of it. Natural, understandable, even useful, and completely full of traps if you rely on it without awareness of what you are doing.

@tippitiwichet

for sure. we have to discriminate and make decisions about how to spend time.

however , i notice people using that excuse for avoiding addressing information that directly conflicts with or questions opinions held without further investigation.

and then making these cheap shots about a topic that's far from being adequately understood.

@holon42 I'm not sure the examples they gave were great ones, but sure.

@AskTheDevil

yes, not the deepest examples, i agree. KISS, i suppose.

there are fuller examples available with google, if anyone wants to pursue it.

@holon42 I heartily support anyone reading up on logical fallacies.

Every fallacy has a basis in cognitive bias, and cognitive biases have instincts behind them. So they occur in parts of the brain that we don't realize are working on us.

We can compensate by understanding those biases so we can recognize them in ourselves and others.

@AskTheDevil @holon42 I have a few pages of notes dedicated to them in the journal I study when I'm upset, I started to try to write down all the main ones and realized I'd be devoting quite a large chunk of my book to them, there are a lot, lol. If you pick up on the feel of a few though, you can start to realize when something is amiss in the logic without memorizing all the formal distinctions.

@tippitiwichet

yes, that's true. it's helpful to have the most frequent ones on tap. if you're suspicious of a text, you can look up definitions at that point. after awhile, you recognize the various species.

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