Robert Todd Carroll, the author of The Skeptic’s Dictionary, has a new book out: The Critical Thinker’s Dictionary: Biases, Fallacies, and Illusion and what you can do about them.
For example, begging the question. The conclusion of the argument is entailed in its premises: abortion is murder, murder is illegal, so abortion should be illegal.
He covers a lot of recent psychological research into phenomena like change blindness, priming, the backfire effect, and many, many others.
He discusses the illusion of skill and the illusion of understanding (We can relate to that: we’ve seen many examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect among our commenters).
The clustering illusion: several cases of cancer in a neighborhood can occur by chance and don’t necessarily mean the inhabitants are being exposed to carcinogens in the soil or water. Communal reinforcement is when a claim becomes a strong belief through repeated assertion by members of a community. Confabulation: we all do it; our memories sometimes mix fact and fiction to recall things that never happened, and on a daily basis we invent reasons to explain how we feel.
Selection bias: Edzard Ernst tells how, as a young doctor, he gave mistletoe injections to cancer patients and was impressed by the results until he realized that his hospital was known throughout Germany for its approach, and desperate patients went there because they wanted that type of treatment and had high expectations.
Under causal fallacies (correlation is not causation) he covers the problem of multiple endpoints in small randomized controlled trials, where spurious correlations are expected due to the laws of chance. He also tells how doctors were interpreting signs of disc disease on MRI scans as an indication for back surgery until someone thought to do MRIs on patients without back pain and found that 2/3 of those showed the same changes.
Ever heard of pareidolia? How about apophenia? It the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena, the tendency to find personal information in noise, seeing patterns where there are none, the kind of subjective validation that cold reading exploits.
This is only a brief taste of the profusion of riches in this book. It comes highly recommended . Whether you are a novice who needs a primer to learn about detecting logical fallacies or are already a seasoned pro, you are certain to learn something from The Critical Thinker’s Dictionary, and you are sure to enjoy the experience.
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