Don’t Just Feel Smarter—Be Smarter: Spot Flawed Arguments and Build Bulletproof Thinking Skills.

Stop Being Manipulated: Master the Art of Critical Thinking and make better decisions, and take Back Control of Your Mind

Critical thinking seems to have fallen out of fashion. That’s unfortunate because critical thinking is a crucial component of effective decision-making. It’s no longer taught in public schools - at least it was not when I went to school, but it is something that I think can be learned and can be taught if you apply yourself to picking up some fundamental skills and habits. Before we discuss how to think critically, it is instructive to also examine standard methods of thinking that are flawed.

Flawed Reasoning Methodologies

There are a couple of common methods of reasoning that almost everyone engages in at some point, which are inherently flawed and should usually be avoided, primarily because they lead to poor decision-making and foster intellectual malaise.

Reasoning by Analogy

Reasoning by analogy is a common and intuitive way that many people use to make sense of the world. It involves drawing a conclusion about an unknown situation by comparing it to more familiar ones that appear (at least on the surface) to share similar characteristics. While it can be a powerful tool for explanation (which is where it is best utilized), it is also a form of reasoning that should be approached with considerable caution, as it can easily lead to flawed conclusions, intellectual laziness, and decision-making that yields very undesirable outcomes.

At its core, reasoning by analogy follows a simple structure:

1. Premise 1: Thing A and Thing B are similar in certain known respects (X, Y, Z).

2. Premise 2: Thing A has an additional, known characteristic (P).

3. Conclusion: Therefore, Thing B likely also has characteristic P.

A classic example is in medicine. If a new drug is effective in treating a specific condition in chimpanzees, and since chimpanzees and humans share significant biological similarities, researchers might infer that the drug could also be effective in humans. This analogy provides a plausible hypothesis that then requires rigorous testing.

Approach with Caution

The primary weakness of analogical reasoning is that it relies on an often unverified (sometimes unverifiable) assumption.

The assumption is that, at a high level, two different things can be effectively compared; and that the underlying fundamental drivers and mechanisms that produce particular and relevant outcomes¹ for one also exist in the other in a way that will produce the same types of outcomes.

Depending on the things being compared and the analogy being constructed, this assumption could be true or false. Worse, it’s often very difficult to determine whether this assumption is true or false unless both your subjects and your analogy are very simplistic and the analogy has been thoroughly and rigorously constructed. Unfortunately, consistent reasoning in this manner tends to result in intellectual laziness rather than intellectual rigor. Consequently, people who typically default to this reasoning approach are even more likely to produce analogies that are not rigorously constructed and, therefore, fallacious.

1. Because your assumed ability to compare is not logically certain, the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premises. Relying on a weak or flawed analogy can lead to significant errors in judgment, with potentially severe consequences.

2. The Similarities are likely to Be Superficial or Irrelevant.

   An analogy is only as strong as the relevance of the similarities between the two things being compared. If the shared characteristics are not causally related to the property being inferred, the analogy is weak. As they say, “the devil is in the details.”

   • Example: "My last two employees with engineering degrees were excellent at their jobs. This new applicant also has an engineering degree, so she will also be excellent."

   • The Flaw: While the degree is a similarity, it may not be the relevant factor. The previous employees' success could have been due to their work ethic, creativity, or communication skills, which are not guaranteed by their degree. The analogy focuses on a superficial similarity while ignoring more critical, underlying attributes.

3. The Differences May Outweigh the Similarities

   Every analogy breaks down eventually because no two things are identical. A faulty analogy often overlooks or downplays critical differences that would render the conclusion invalid.

   • Example: "The government should be run like a business. A good CEO makes swift, unilateral decisions to ensure profitability, so a president should do the same to ensure the nation's success."

   • The Flaw: This common analogy ignores profound differences. A business's primary goal is profit, and its CEO is accountable to and empowered by a board of directors to make swift, unilateral decisions. A government's primary goal is the welfare of its citizens, and a president is accountable to the entire populace through a complex system of checks and balances, which is usually governed by a bureaucracy over which the President has limited direct control. These differences are far more significant than the superficial similarity of "leadership."

4. It Can Be Used as a Rhetorical Trick to Oversimplify Complex Issues

   Analogies are powerful, persuasive tools because they make complex ideas seem familiar and straightforward. However, this can be used to bypass logical and critical thought processes, appealing instead to emotion or intuition.

   1. This is often a very successful approach by marketers and self-promoters who are appealing to a potential customer base that engages in emotional decision-making (something you see in those promoting new age spirituality, pop psychology, and self-help courses).

      
      When you hear an analogy being drawn in a debate, interview, or sales pitch in a way that jumps to a conclusion (as opposed to one that educates on how something works), it's often a sign to pay closer attention. (To me, it’s a warning that there is going to be an appeal to emotion.) This is dangerous not because emotions are bad, but because you are being led away from thinking about a subject in a logical or critical manner, and you are now being led into a sales pitch where the speaking is preparing you for a sale by appealing to a set of emotional needs, selling points or hot buttons.
      

      It is a long-established principle in sales that sales decisions are often emotional decisions, so there is a strong desire to shift your thinking from the cognitive space to the emotional space.

      • Example: "Trying to regulate the economy is like trying to hold water in your hands. The harder you squeeze, the more it slips through your fingers."

      • The Flaw: This creates a vivid, simple image suggesting that all economic regulation is futile and counterproductive. It avoids the difficult and nuanced discussion about which specific regulations might be beneficial or harmful, replacing a complex debate with a simplistic and memorable metaphor.

5. It Often Leads to a False Sense of Understanding

   Because analogies connect new information to something we already know, they can make us feel like we understand a topic more deeply than we actually do. When building an analogy, the level of analysis is almost always superficial in order to keep it easily understandable. This stifles curiosity and prevents a more thorough investigation of the new subject on its own terms. When encountering an argument based on an analogy, one should always critically ask:

   • Are the similarities between the two cases relevant? Do they behave the same? Are the outputs in each case motivated/driven by the same drivers?

   • Are there significant differences that are being ignored?

   • Is this analogy clarifying the issue or oversimplifying it?

   By maintaining a healthy skepticism, you can harness the explanatory power of analogies without falling victim to their pitfalls.

Reasoning by Social Consensus

Reasoning by Social Consensus is even worse than reasoning by analogy. It's a form of cognitive shortcut, or heuristic, that has both practical benefits and significant dangers. It’s an okay method for gathering information from people who may have more experience in a particular area than you do, but it’s flawed and can be dangerous.

Reasoning by Social Consensus: A Double-Edged Sword

When faced with a decision, especially one where we lack personal experience, it's completely normal to turn to our social circle. We gather opinions, feelings, and anecdotes from people we trust to form a conclusion. While this approach can feel reassuring, it's a method of reasoning that relies more on social proof than on any objective evidence.

Why We Do It

• Efficiency and Trust: It's a fast way to gather information. We trust our friends to have our best interests at heart, so their advice comes pre-vetted with a layer of goodwill.

• Shared Context: Friends often understand our personal situation, values, and history. Their advice can be more tailored and relevant than generic advice from an expert who doesn't know us.

• Access to Practical Experience: For certain decisions (e.g., "Which contractor should I hire?" or "Is this part of town safe?"), The anecdotal experience of your network can be very valuable and more practical than abstract information.

• Emotional Support: The process itself builds consensus and provides emotional validation and support, making us feel more confident and less alone in our decision.

The Hidden Dangers

• The Echo Chamber Effect: Our friends are often very similar to us. They likely share similar backgrounds, income levels, political views, and life experiences. By polling only them, you are not getting a diverse range of opinions; you are getting slightly different versions of your own perspective reflected back at you.

• Lack of True Expertise: While a friend might have a strong opinion about something, such as a financial investment, it doesn't necessarily mean they possess genuine financial expertise. We often fail to distinguish between confidence and competence in our social circle. Even if they are an expert, an appeal to authority is a logical fallacy.

• Emotional Bias: A friend’s advice is colored by their emotional connection to you. They may advise you to take the safest, least risky path to protect you from potential harm, even if a more dangerous path might be more rewarding. Their goal is often to ensure your comfort and to maintain a positive relationship with you, rather than to achieve the best outcome for you. As a result, they may unintentionally validate biases, thoughts, feelings, and conclusions you have that may ultimately not be in your best interest. i.e., they are likely to tell you what you want to hear, especially if they sense you have an emotional attachment to a particular course of action or outcome. Friends will be much less likely to challenge you and risk damaging your relationship with them.

Associated Fallacies and Biases

Relying on this method makes you vulnerable to several logical fallacies:

1. Sampling Bias / Unrepresentative Sample: This is the most significant flaw. Your friend circle is not a statistically representative sample of all available knowledge. Making a broad conclusion based on this tiny, biased dataset is inherently unreliable.

2. Appeal to Popularity (Ad Populum): This fallacy occurs when you assume something is true or the right course of action simply because many people in your group believe it is. "All my friends think it's a bad idea, so it must be a bad idea." The consensus of a small group doesn't make something factually correct. Remember that at one time in the early 20th century, it was the consensus of Doctors that smoking was good for you if you were a man because it made you more manly. They also believed that women were prone to “female hysteria”, an emotional weakness, for which the popular treatment involved the doctor performing “pelvic massages” (clitoral masturbation via manual stimulation of a woman’s genitals), which often led to “hysterical paroxysm” (now understood to be an orgasm). Early vibrators were created to make this “treatment” more efficient, as manual stimulation was reportedly tiresome for many doctors. These examples illustrate how “prevailing popular wisdom,” even coming from supposed experts, is often just total rubbish.

3. Confirmation Bias: You will naturally, and perhaps unconsciously, give more weight to the friends whose advice confirms what you already want to do. You end up not seeking counsel, but instead seeking permission from your peers.

4. Individual Projection: Your friends or peers’ opinions and recommendations may be influenced by aspects that bring them emotional fulfillment in their own lives, reflecting their personal struggles. Perhaps someone who is bored and seeks excitement through personal drama recommends a course of action because it makes them appear supportive, but secretly, they relish the drama and excitement in their lives, or it allows them to act out their fantasies, or discharge their feelings of spite, resentment, anger, or retribution, via a proxy, without having to live with the consequences. While we may believe that our friends or peers would never do something like that, it would be extremely naive to ignore this. It happens all the time; most people act in their self-interest. Thus, if you engage in this type of activity, you always need to evaluate the responses you receive against what you know of that person and ask yourself, What do they have to gain if you followed their advice? It makes the entire enterprise frustrating and erodes any perceived value in decision-making via social consensus.

5. Anecdotal Fallacy: This is the mistake of valuing a few personal stories ("My cousin bought that car and it was a nightmare") over objective, large-scale data (professional reviews and reliability ratings).

6. Propensity to result in emotional decision-making: Feedback from friends, including their opinions, is likely to be emotionally charged. Once all of the feedback from “trusted advisors” is in, there is a very real danger of proceeding with a course of action based on how you feel about a particular set of feedback. This is dangerous because emotions are not objective and are likely to be influenced by your pre-existing biases, preconceptions of emotional safety, or aversion to things you find scary. Most often, it will not lead to sound decision-making and is likely to result in extremely poor decision-making, with long-term negative consequences. (which are rarely considered when engaging in this type of activity.)

Reasoning by social consensus is excellent for low-stakes, personal decisions where shared context is important (e.g., choosing a restaurant or a movie). However, it is a very dangerous method for high-stakes, personal, objective decision-making (e.g., financial planning, medical choices, or forming a view on a complex scientific topic). A wise approach is to use your friend circle as a starting point to gather initial ideas, but to then actively analyze that feedback, seek out conflicting opinions, expert advice, and objective data from outside that comfortable circle.

Critical Thinking

In our discussion regarding critical thinking, I’ve attempted to summarize what I think are some of the most important Skills, Habits, and Principles below. Just note that it’s one thing to read these, but you will only be capable of practicing critical thinking if you practice frequently and diligently.

1. Clear and Accurate Observation - Learning to notice relevant details without immediately jumping to conclusions. A good way to practise this is to slow down when gathering information. Ask yourself, “What exactly is it that I am seeing, hearing, or reading?” and then some follow-up questions, “What might this mean? What does it imply?”

2. Interpretation and Comprehension - Translating raw information (words, actions, numbers) into meaningful concepts. Paraphrase arguments in your own words and check to make sure you understand. Be sure to drill down into definitions to remove ambiguity and clarify understanding. If a term is vague or can be interpreted in different ways, or if you feel like the person you are speaking with may be using a word in a specific way, stop, ask clarifying questions, and then insist on a precise meaning before proceeding.

3. Identifying and Questioning Assumptions - This is one of the most essential points in this list. Every argument or belief rests on often unstated premises and assumptions that may not be immediately apparent and that a speaker will typically not call out ahead of time. Detecting those hidden beliefs is crucial. I have listened to scientists and apologists draw conclusions that rely on unfounded, unproven, or unjustifiable assumptions. This is critical because if an assumption is false or shaky, the entire argument could collapse. When you are confronted with a claim or assertion of any type —your own or someone else’s—ask:

   • What is being implicitly taken for granted in this assertion?

   • i.e. What is being assumed?

   • Finally, challenge all of the premises and assumptions you can identify: “Are these assumptions valid?” “What if these assumptions or premises are wrong?”

   • I think this article is a good illustration of examining assumptions and how underlying assumptions may not be reliable:

   • https://www.ldstoorthodox.org/publish/post/165874413?back=%2Fpublish%2Fposts%2Fscheduled

4. Logical Analysis (Reasoning Skills) - Understanding how conclusions follow (or don’t follow) from premises. This includes recognizing common logical fallacies (e.g., ad hominem, straw man, false dilemma). Spotting invalid or unsound arguments prevents you from being persuaded by misleading rhetoric.

   • This can be practiced by breaking down arguments into “If A, then B” form. Test validity: “If A is true, must B be true?” Practice by examining opinion pieces or debates and deliberately hunting for hidden leaps in logic.

   • We will examine both informal and formal logic in future articles.

5. Causality vs Correlation - There is a commonly known and accepted concept that correlation does not equal causation. i.e. Just because two things, let’s call them A and B may appear to be correlated, it doesn’t mean that A causes B or that B causes A. Let’s look at some examples.

   1. E.g. 1: Ice Cream Sales and Drowning Deaths

      • Correlation: As ice cream sales increase, so do the number of drowning deaths.

      • No Causation: Eating ice cream does not make people drown, nor does drowning make people buy ice cream.

      • Hidden Variable (that underlies both scenarios): Warm Weather/Summer. In the summer, more people buy ice cream (because it's hot), and more people go swimming (leading to more potential drownings). The warm weather is a common factor that underlies both statistics.

   2. E.g. 2: Low Self-Esteem and Poor Academic Performance

      • Correlation: Students with low self-esteem often have lower academic performance.

      • No Simple Causation: While low self-esteem can hinder focus and motivation, it's also highly plausible that poor academic performance (e.g., getting bad grades) leads to lower self-esteem. It can be a cyclical relationship, or underlying factors like learning disabilities, home environment, or mental health issues could contribute to both.

   3. E.g. 3: Smoking and Lung Cancer

      • Correlation: People who smoke heavily have a significantly higher incidence of lung cancer.

      • Direct Causation: Scientific and medical research has definitively shown that the carcinogens in tobacco smoke directly damage lung cells, leading to the development of cancer. Smoking causes lung cancer.

   4. E.g. 4: Gravity and Falling Objects

      • Correlation: When an object is dropped, it accelerates downwards. The longer it falls, the faster it goes (in the absence of air resistance) until it reaches a maximum rate of acceleration due to gravity (9.8m/s^2).

      • Causation: The Earth's gravitational pull causes objects to accelerate towards its center. Gravity causes things to fall.

6. Inferences and Conclusions (Hypothesis formation) - Using available information to form a hypothesis that can be tested when not all facts are available. Being able to do so is essential because real-world problems almost never present themselves with all the answers or relevant data on a platter. We must infer missing data and missing links.