The recent Mises Caucus sweep in the LP is the first substantially favorable breeze in the direction of liberty that we've seen in quite some time. My hope is that RPF may attract new folks from MC or other big-L and small-l libertarians and foster coordination, communication and even growth of the liberty movement. To that end, I will be posting here on subjects related to reasoning, debate, philosophy and organization in order to share tools that can act as force-multipliers for individuals in the liberty movement, whether they are working directly in the MC or contributing in a more indirect way. Of course, these tools will help anybody but the point is that we need to spread a generous layer of fertilizer to help boost growth in the movement and really turn this liberty wave into a liberty tsunami. These tools will pay life-long dividends so, no matter who you are or what you do for a living, you can benefit from investing some time into increasing your personal effectiveness with these tools.
The first tool in the toolbox is thinking (reasoning). If you have a problem, the way to overcome that problem is to solve it. But you can't solve a problem if you don't think about it properly. We take the skill of thinking for granted, as though thinking is just "obvious". Even worse, we often treat thinking as some kind of inscrutable, God-given gift that is completely unlike any other skill and cannot be improved through deliberate study and practice. You were either born an Einstein or one of the Stooges and no amount of applied effort can change that. In fact, thinking is no different than any other basic skill and can be improved by deliberate practice.
The first step in improving your reasoning ability is to learn to identify logical fallacies. We've all run across these fallacies countless times in life. Most political whoppers out there ride on one or more of these basic fallacies. So, learning to be able to spot them quickly will not only help you reduce the accidental use of those fallacies in your own thinking and speech, it will help you quickly spot them in the arguments made by political opponents, and call them out on it. The goal here is not to become the world's best lint-picker... throwing a flag on every single fallacy that someone employs is a fast-track to losing a debate. Rather, you need to learn to spot the core fallacies that form the main support column of their bad argument, and then detonate those by simply pointing them out and asking them to justify their reasoning at those crucial points.
Here's a video that covers a selection of fallacies to get you started:
For more in-depth research, you can start with these lists of logical fallacies:
RationalWiki list of fallacies
Wikipedia list of fallacies
It is helpful to be able to put a name to the major fallacies and so I encourage you to memorize the names of at least the fallacies on the following chart (click for full-resolution):
Fallacies tell you how not to think, but they don't tell you how to think. In the next post, I will give some informal discussion on logic and reasoning in general.
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