Spotting Bad Arguments

An argument, in the thinking sense, is a claim plus the reasons that back it up. Good arguments have reasons that actually support the claim. Bad arguments - fallacies - look convincing but have a hidden crack, and learning to spot the cracks makes you very hard to fool.

Fallacies come in favorite flavors. The everyone agrees fallacy says a thing must be true because it is popular - but crowds have been wrong plenty of times. The after-this fallacy says that because one thing happened after another, the first caused it: I wore my red socks and we won, so the socks did it. And the straw-man fallacy pretends someone said something sillier than they did, then attacks the silly version instead of the real one.

The antidote is three questions. What exactly is the claim? What reasons are given? Do the reasons actually prove the claim, or just decorate it? Ask these about advertisements, headlines, and playground debates alike, and you will see the cracks everywhere - including, sometimes, in your own arguments, which is where the real growing happens.