A Handy Guide to Logical Fallacies & Biases
It’s easy to win the internet when you can demolish your opponent’s argument with a well-chosen phrase. Here’s a useful lexicon to ensure you own your enemies. Most of these are informal fallacies, which means you can use them without changing out of your boxers.
whataboutery
Liberals often use this trick to try show that causal explanations need to account for relevantly similar activities which don’t fall under the proposed explanatory framework. So when a Muslim blows himself up after reading the suicide bomb verses in the Koran, liberals go What about Timothy McVeigh? What about Baader-Meinhof? What about the LTTE? LOL, Whataboutery!
virtue signalling
People have always boasted about how they make crepes for the homeless or don’t eat animals or feel sad about refugees. Virtue signalling is more specific, referring to expressions of solidarity with the marginalised and forgotten. An editorial policy recommending only gender neutral pronouns or foregoing italics when quoting local languages might seem like an attempt to promote inclusivity. Nope. Sorry. Virtue signalling!
ad hominem
In the old days we used to call instances of this fallacy ‘insults’. Satire isn’t necessarily ad hominem, as long as it isn’t too effete and pretentious. A good example of satire is calling people libtards or women hysterical.
dunning-kruger effect
A cognitive bias rather than a logical fallacy, the Dunning-Kruger effect describes the ideas of people whose high-powered jobs and active sex lives leave no time for keeping up to date with Reddit.
confirmation bias
Liberals expect to see racism, misogyny and homophobia everywhere they look. When they encounter these phenomena in their daily lives, their confirmation bias leads them to think their preconceptions are true.
concept creep
Smart professionals are able to support their arguments by inventing appropriate terms. For example, bullying used to have a very precise and limited meaning. These days, we have a more nuanced and open-ended sense of how aggression works. Before you feel too bad, note that this is actually concept creep, not a real thing.
How can you tell distinguish concept creep from the natural evolution of language? Through psychological science.
begging the question
Never heard of it.
