Is it worthwhile to teach about "Logical Fallacies?"
When in high school, one of my English classes had a unit on logical fallacies. Everyone was given a list of "logical fallacies" like "appeal to authority" and "slippery slope." We had to do things like match examples with the names of the fallacies (which would almost always have multiple reasonable answers), and come up with examples of various fallacies.
At the time, I thought that this was a huge waste of time. 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. I have not really questioned this initial judgement until just now.
Now I am forming a new opinion on this question, and would like collect some opinions from Less Wrong.
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 a...
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