Use your creative thinking to fight fallacies.

There is a huge list of logical fallacies one can make. In fact one of our memory exercises focuses on them. The full list is too long to follow… How can we use our knowledge to fight our own fallacies?

First of all we need to manage our attention. This is counter-intuitive. We are not trained to notice where our attention goes. One of the exercises to start noticing the attention goes like this: “every time you want to look at something or do something, say aloud what you are planning to do”. This eliminates some level of multitasking and slows us down, but it allows for full accountability for our attention. Try to notice patterns.

For example, many of our readers either overfocus or totally miss the beginning or the end of a paragraph or a text line. This is a reading bias we are well aware of. As teachers we track the density of markers and details across the text, which needs to be almost uniform. If we find statistical bias we inform our students and ask them to make a concious effort to read longer or shorter various parts of the text. For example, before taking the course, I used to miss the title of each article and who wrote it. I still have some hard time remembering the authors and the year of publication, even though I make a concious effort to remember them. Anna has hard time focusing on dates and geographical locations, since she does not have good markers for historical events (unfortunately history induces Anna to sleep).

A harder issue to fix is lack of interest. When we are not interested in something it does not draw our focus. Moreover, it is very hard to notice this statistically. When confronted by a teacher, the student tries to find a good reason not to remember something that is of no personal interest. The best way to confront this is to generate such personal interest. If you have subcontractor status, you will be very interested in taxation issues: they mean thousands of dollars and if you are not careful potential criminal allegations. If you have an investment account, even a small one, you will be very interested in economics. If you visit a country, you tend to remember its history and its language. Alternatively you can focus on how you feel towards the text: trying to find errors in what is written, trying to understand how this can be used in your everyday life, imagining how the universe would be different without it. Everything works, as long as you are able to generate the interest.

Another fallacy we follow is sleep related. When we sleep we override the memories of our lives, occasionally generating false memories. The conventional way to fight this tendency is spaced repetition. We write down in short and undistorted form what we need to remember, and over time repeat and check the list. The repetition should not be automatic: you should find what patterns distort your memories and try to find them when you memorize next set of information. The errors will never go away, but with time there will be less errors and harder to find a pattern.

I will try to review additional fallacies from time to time. If you notice something interesting, please feel free to share.