Know your logical fallacies

A large part of leadership is critical thinking... so get it right

Making good decisions is critical to success, so don’t do these:

• Hasty Generalization - “this always happens when we try this”, normally the flaw of these claims is that the dataset isn’t sufficiently large to reach the conclusion.

• Sunk cost fallacy - past time/money has already been spent, make the decision to continue as you would now regardless of the past and with the info you have available today.

• Strawman Argument - making your position stronger than it really is by misrepresenting the counter-position, oversimplifying the debate is a foolish error or a bad tactic.

• Appeal to Authority - so and so says it so it must be correct.

• False dichotomy - “we have to do either X or Y”. Do we really? Often used to force a decision.

• Single cause fallacy - pretty much everything has more than one cause, normally a case of misconstruing events.

• Correlation is not causation - think about if these correlating things are linked at all, or if the reason for the correlation is elsewhere.

• Red herring - a distraction that sounds like it relates to the discussion, but actually doesn’t.

• Texas sharpshooter fallacy - you take a large dataset and paint your target conclusion on it, just as the proverbial Texan did. He shots holes in a barn and then painted a target around where he hit.

• Slippery Slope - if we do this, all hell will break lose, when in actual fact, we don’t know what will happen in the future.

• Regression fallacy - when things get back to normal we assume it is because of the action we took, when we don’t know that. Actually this is a specific type of post hoc fallacy i.e. 'after this, therefore because of this'

• Jumping on the bandwagon - we all know this one… just because other people agree doesn’t make it right. Typically you will only get this in a work setting if your team is not thinking critically e.g. neglecting the biases above.

These are all actually variations of the ‘Questionable cause’ or casual fallacy, but a worth splitting out as they are so common.

Keep your bullshit detector on red alert.

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Unrelated to business

A final comment on the ‘Tu Quoque Fallacy’, literally ‘you too’, it is a type of ad hominem argument. Ad hominem arguments are deeply unpleasant i.e. a literal attack a person’s character. Those should happen in the workplace extremely rarely. The Tu Quoque Fallacy means disparaging someone’s argument because it is somehow inconsistent with their own behavior e.g. when Leo gets on a jet to attend a climate conference. There may be some merit, and certainly irony, to that observation but it doesn’t really hold up logically. If Leo pushes forward the cause of climate change, that’s a good thing and his beliefs are not incorrect simply because he boarded a Learjet. Normally this is the reproach of those projecting their own shortcomings onto others.

Another fallacy you hear outside the workplace a lot, especially from conspiracy nuts, is the Appeal to Ignorance e.g. the illumanti must exist, they’re just so in control they can hide the evidence. What we don’t know, doesn’t inform us of anything. The best way to deal with these lunatics - if you must - is to shift the ‘burden of proof’ onto them i.e. those making the assertion must display and reason the evidence.