- I still remember the thrill of first encountering a summary of Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit. Reading through the list of logical fallacies, I could feel a change come over my being and my posture: my biceps bulged, my abs hardened into a carapace, and my gonads turned to solid granite. I had discovered the secret weapons cache of the elite commandoes of reason, and now I felt invincible. Armed with Sagan's checklist, I was sure I could survive any argument undefeated. Creationists, paranormalists and fanboys alike would fall before my big guns of logic: I'd mow them all down like Arnie in Terminator 2.
But when I went on Internet forums and saw the Baloney Detection Kit in action, I was shocked and puzzled. Thousands of other people had discovered the secret weapons cache, but they were not, as I had expected, blowing away all before them. In their hands, the logical fallacy terms did not look like decisive weapons; instead, they looked clumsy, cumbersome, easy to outmanoeuvre. Why did people who deployed these terms always look so rigid, so predictable, so feeble? Why did people who avoided them look so confident in comparison, so much more in command of their resources, so much more mature?
My favorite is wanton use of the strawman attack. Which is to say, calling someone out for a strawman argument, when the caller clearly doesn't know what that type of fallacy is. In internet parlance, strawman seeme to mean "an argument I don't tend to agree with." Oh but it sounds brilliant so often.