It is difficult for me to ascertain when the person I am communicating is using a logical fallacy to trick me into believing him or doubting my judgement, even when I realise it hours after the argument.
I have seen countless arguments in Reddit threads and I couldn’t figure out who was in the right or wrong unless I looked at the upvote counts. Even if the person is uttering a blatant lie, they somehow make it sound in a way that is completely believable to me. If it weren’t for those people that could exactly point out the irrationality behind these arguments, my mind would have been lobotomised long ago.
I do want to learn these critical thinking skills but I don’t know where to begin from. I could have all these tips and strategies memorised in theory, but they would be essentially useless if I am not able to think properly or remember them at the heat of the moment.
There could be many situations I could be unprepared for, like when the other person brings up a fact or statistic to support their claim and I have no way to verify it at the moment, or when someone I know personally to be wise or well-informed bring up about such fallacies, perhaps about a topic they are not well-versed with or misinformed of by some other unreliable source, and I don’t know whether to believe them or myself.
Could someone help me in this? I find this skill of distinguishing fallacies from facts to be an extremely important thing to have in this age of misinformation and would really wish to learn it well if possible. Maybe I could take inspiration from how you came about learning these critical thinking skills by your own.
Edit: I do not blindly trust the upvote count in a comment thread to determine who is right or wrong. It just helps me inform that the original opinion is not inherently acceptable by everyone. It is up to me decide who is actually correct or not, which I can do at my leisure unlike in a live conversation with someone where I don’t get the time to think rationally about what the other person is saying.
Upvotes on a comment or thread are absolutely not the way to determine which person is right, and it’s not even the way to determine which point of view is more popular. All those numbers give you is how many upvotes the comment got. In two separate communities, you’ll see completely contradictory statements be most popular because the people who feel a certain way tend to congregate.
If you want to become a more discerning information consumer, you can look up the common logical fallacies and keep them in mind, but nothing beats actually being informed, and forming your own opinion. Now, this is pretty hard because all news media is inherently biased, and so many things happen all the time that it’s hard to keep up.
What I’ve found helpful, is when it comes to things I don’t know about, I read the discussion as “this person says this, and that person says that”, rather than “this person is saying the truth, and that person is lying”. If it’s a subject that matters to me, I’ll have a look at some news, see where the general consensus is, analyze it from my own point of view, and form my opinion like that. If it doesn’t really matter to me, I don’t really do that, and just relay information as “I heard it might be either X or Y, but I don’t know for sure”, “I heard from Z that something or other”.
Edit: Of course, it’s not like I’m some paragon of unbiased information crunching. I have my own biases that I’m aware of, but naturally I think I’m right, so I think they’re not a problem, which is probably a problem. Everything you experience is relative.