When I was in high school, one of the exercises we did was to take a newspaper column, and find all of the fallacies it employed. It was a fun thing to do, and is good awareness raising for critical thinking, but it probably wouldn't be enough to stave off being deceived by an artful propagandist unless I did it until it was reflexive. To catch the fallacy being, I usually have to read a sentence three or four times to see the underlying logic behind it and remember why the logic is invalid, when I'm confronted by something as fallacy ridden as an ad for the Love Calculator, I just give up in exhaustion. Worse, when I'm watching television, I can't even rewind to see what they said (I suspect the fallacy count is higher too).

To counter this, (and to further hone my fallacy finding skills), I've extended the fallacy finding exercise to work on video. Take a video from a genre that generally has a high fallacy per minute ratio (e.g. Campaign ads, political debates, speeches, regular ads, Oprah) and edit the video to play a klaxon sound whenever someone commits a logical fallacy or gets a fact wrong, followed by the name of the fallacy they committed flashing on screen.

EDIT: I've made one of these and uploaded it to Youtube. Thank you Eliezer and CannibalSmith for the encouragement. You can find other debates at CNN, and youtube lets you do annotations so no editing software is technically required. I'll be posting further videos to this post as I make/find them.

Follow-up to: So you say you're an altruist

The responses to So you say you're an altruist indicate that people have split their values into two categories:

1. values they use to decide what they want
2. values that are admissible for moral reasoning

(where 2 is probably a subset of 1 for atheists, and probably nearly disjoint from 1 for Presbyterians).

You're reading Less Wrong.  You're a rationalist.  You've put a lot of effort into education, and learning the truth about the world.  You value knowledge and rationality and truth a lot.

Someone says you should send all your money to Africa, because this will result in more human lives.

What happened to the value you placed on knowledge and rationality?

There is little chance that any of the people you save in Africa will get a good post-graduate education and then follow that up by rejecting religion, embracing rationality, and writing Less Wrong posts.

Here you are, spending a part of your precious life reading Less Wrong.  If you spend 10% of your life on the Web, you are saying that that activity is worth at least 1/10th of a life, and that lives with no access to the Web are worth less than lives with access.  If you value rationality, then lives lived rationally are more valuable than lives lived irrationally.  If you think something has a value, you have to give it the same value in every equation.  Not doing so is immoral.  You can't use different value scales for everyday and moral reasoning.

Society tells you to work to make yourself more valuable.  Then it tells you that when you reason morally, you must assume that all lives are equally valuable.  You can't have it both ways.  If all lives have equal value, we shouldn't criticize someone who decides to become a drug addict on welfare.  Value is value, regardless of which equation it's in at the moment.

Followup to:  The Parable of the Dagger

"All men are mortal.  Socrates is a man.  Therefore Socrates is mortal."
        — Aristotle(?)

    Socrates raised the glass of hemlock to his lips...
    "Do you suppose," asked one of the onlookers, "that even hemlock will not be enough to kill so wise and good a man?"
    "No," replied another bystander, a student of philosophy; "all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man; and if a mortal drink hemlock, surely he dies."
    "Well," said the onlooker, "what if it happens that Socrates isn't mortal?"
    "Nonsense," replied the student, a little sharply; "all men are mortal by definition; it is part of what we mean by the word 'man'. All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal.  It is not merely a guess, but a logical certainty."
    "I suppose that's right..." said the onlooker. "Oh, look, Socrates already drank the hemlock while we were talking."
    "Yes, he should be keeling over any minute now," said the student.
    And they waited, and they waited, and they waited...
    "Socrates appears not to be mortal," said the onlooker.
    "Then Socrates must not be a man," replied the student.  "All men are mortal, Socrates is not mortal, therefore Socrates is not a man.  And that is not merely a guess, but a logical certainty."

Once upon a time, there was a court jester who dabbled in logic.

The jester presented the king with two boxes.  Upon the first box was inscribed:

"Either this box contains an angry frog, or the box with a false inscription contains an angry frog, but not both."

On the second box was inscribed:

"Either this box contains gold and the box with a false inscription contains an angry frog, or this box contains an angry frog and the box with a true inscription contains gold."

And the jester said to the king:  "One box contains an angry frog, the other box gold; and one, and only one, of the inscriptions is true."