There could be some mysterious third force causing both to happen. Yet, when you dig into the data, the researchers found correlations-ice cream and job losses-and not causation.Īnxiety and depression increased and social media usage increased.
You often see news articles announcing things such as, “Social Media causes anxiety and depression” or that “unemployment is caused by raising the minimum wage.” Yet, you’d be surprised how often this sort of thing gets passed off as “news” in the world. Would you then say that me eating ice cream causes people to lose jobs? (If so, this would be one strange superpower.) Or would you simply say these are two common occurrences that happen to be occurring together for a short period of time? And what’s crazier is that the last time I ate ice cream, somebody else lost their job. Let’s pretend for a second that today, I ate some ice cream and you lost your job. Just because two things regularly occur together does not mean one causes the other. Let’s start with probably the most important fallacy to understand-the one you and I and everyone we know fucks up with abandon: correlation is not causation.
Red herring fallacy commercials how to#
It will teach you how to not only spot them in yourself but also how to spot them in others. This article will take you through some of the most common logical fallacies. These fallacies are right in front of our noses, yet we are so comfortable with our own thought processes that we fail to spot them. Worse, we’re mostly unaware of how they disrupt and harm our lives, often in profound ways. What most people don’t realize is that logical fallacies-that is, errors in judgment and reasoning-are incredibly common in day-to-day life. Their ambition has been to determine what we can know to be true and what we cannot know to be true. As such, philosophers have killed many trees over the centuries, analyzing and determining the principles that define logic and reason. Logic is the bedrock of pretty much all human knowledge. Just because a line of reasoning is intuitive does not mean it’s correct-logic can often be counterintuitive.Just because two things often occur together does not mean that they will necessarily always occur together.Others simply couldn’t follow what was going on, struggling to follow the steps in reasoning between “people,” “train,” and “time.” But I loved it.ĭespite the outrage, the professor was demonstrating some of the most fundamental principles of thinking: Many would accuse the professor of making shit up to humiliate them and give them poor grades. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many pissed off twenty-year-olds as I did in that classroom each week. Pretty much everyone in the class would answer “yes” and then become infuriated when the professor told us the correct answer was no-just because trains always arrive when there are many passengers does not mean that many passengers will always result in a train arriving. Is it necessarily true that a train will arrive soon?” You arrive at the station and see many passengers waiting on the platform. “Every time a train arrives at the station, there are many passengers on the platform. Each morning, we’d all come into class to find a question like this on the board: I needed to take an elective from the humanities department, and not wanting to get sucked into a seminar on “Romantic literature of the 1840s” or whatever, I went for the least humanities-sounding thing I could find on the list: a philosophy course called “Logic and Reasoning.” It probably ended up being the most valuable course I ever took in my life.įrom day one, I loved my logic course. That happened to me in my sophomore year.
I mean that most of the courses you take will never be all that relevant to the rest of your life.īut then, every once in a while, often by accident, you stumble into a course that is hugely impactful on your life. That’s not because the professors are bad or the coursework is pointless (although sometimes that is definitely the case). I’m going to be honest: most courses you take in university aren’t worth a whole lot.
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