Is it worthwhile to teach about “Logical Fallacies?”
It’s worth learning about logical fallacies and internalizing them. It might not be worthwhile to teach people about them in school because people often don’t remember & internalize what they’re taught there.
My reasoning was that there were many more ways to give arguments incorrectly than to give arguments correctly, and that we should instead be teaching people what valid arguments are, and not to trust anything else.
While it’s important to be able to recognize & build a valid argument, it’s still been useful for me to use knowledge of fallacies to set mental triggers which activate when I mentally reach for a fallacy. Instead of unreflectively using an appeal to authority (for example) as a cognitive short-cut without checking whether it actually works, the not-quite-conscious sensation of making the appeal gets flagged for conscious attention, and I realize, “Oh! I’m making an appeal to authority. Does that appeal actually have much evidential weight?”
Edit: this isn’t directly responsive to you, but I can also imagine LWers who’ve moved on to noticing newerfallacies finding it harder to understand why it’s worth studying more well-known & canonical fallacies, even if the latter are as important.
It’s worth learning about logical fallacies and internalizing them. It might not be worthwhile to teach people about them in school because people often don’t remember & internalize what they’re taught there.
While it’s important to be able to recognize & build a valid argument, it’s still been useful for me to use knowledge of fallacies to set mental triggers which activate when I mentally reach for a fallacy. Instead of unreflectively using an appeal to authority (for example) as a cognitive short-cut without checking whether it actually works, the not-quite-conscious sensation of making the appeal gets flagged for conscious attention, and I realize, “Oh! I’m making an appeal to authority. Does that appeal actually have much evidential weight?”
Edit: this isn’t directly responsive to you, but I can also imagine LWers who’ve moved on to noticing newer fallacies finding it harder to understand why it’s worth studying more well-known & canonical fallacies, even if the latter are as important.