Circumventing Logical Fallacies

There are millions of things you experience in a day one or another that ultimately affects the actions in your upcoming days. It affects how you deal with different problems, how you talk to people, and how you will live the rest of your life. Every small thing matters and affects your upcoming decisions. A breakup with your girlfriend or getting fired from a job creates different problems in your life on top of the prevailing problems.

Due to many other events happening in our life, sometimes we make biases, wrong decisions, fallacies, etc. Every human makes all of these logical fallacies throughout their lives, and those who know about these can circumvent almost all of them using rationality. I have listed out my experiences with these incidents and ways to circumvent these issues.

Emotional Factors

Emotional factors are the root cause of the maximum number of logical fallacies. Your day completely depends on the mornings and the earlier days. If you had a fight with someone recently in your personal life, it ultimately reflects in your professional life and clouds your reasoning skills. You can’t think clearly if you fought with your spouse just a few hours ago, and this is a problem many people deal with.

Actually, people don’t consider it as a problem, it’s an evergoing thought in their minds. Students can’t think in their examination if their mom and dad are getting divorced in a few months. These are some clear examples of how emotional factors like sadness, trauma, personal issues, etc., affect people.

Almost every person in the world goes through these things, but some can still maintain their reasoning and analytical skills and work efficiently. A simple reason behind those people’s efficiency is RATIONAL THINKING. Just formulate the thing like a math problem, analyze its consequences, and ask yourself these questions:

• The thing that is bothering me, what the worst that could happen?

• Let’s consider the worst-case scenario. What would happen to me if I keep on taking my financial conditions if I continue like this?

• What’s the probability of the worst-case scenario?

• Are my current stress and continuous over-thinking helping me in any way solving my problem?

Rationalize the things in your life, put proper logic and thought before moving out of your everyday. Leave your home issues at home. I was an over-over-thinker. I spoiled lots of my exams due to my mom's bad health conditions. Ultimately, she was recovered soon, but then my results came out, which were bad enough to make me sad again. So, now you can see how these problems are intertwined with each other. So, RATIONALIZE YOUR THOUGHTS!

Develop Sherlock’s Traits

I was reading “The Complete Novels of Sherlock Holmes,” and I came across an amazing scenario where John Watson (Blogger of Sherlock Holmes) meets his future wife, Mary Morstan. She came to the flat of Mr. Holmes and Dr.Watson.

Dr. Watson was completely flattered by her superficial beauty and couldn't pay attention to anything apart from admiring her face and lips in his mind. When she left the flat, Dr. Watson made a comment about her beauty and said to Sherlock Holmes, “ What a beautiful lady.” Sherlock asked, “Was she?” and Dr. Watson was stunned by the fact that how could a person ignore her beauty. At this moment, Sherlock Holmes gave the most prominent advice that one can take in his entire life :

Never allow your judgment to be biased by personal qualities.

I hope Nick Dunne of Gone Girl could have read this before marrying Amazing Amy. Every time I am overthinking about another person's particular personal quality or getting stressed due to some negative (personal) thought of my own, this line strikes my mind. Things automatically fall into places when I just think about them more logically.

Never Make Exceptions

Another great line by Sherlock Holmes that helps you to solve most of the big problems of your lives is :

I never make exceptions. An exception disproves the rule.

This line can be interpreted in a wonderful way to circumvent your logical fallacies. Let me give you a scenario :

1. You failed in one of your interviews last week. There are two more interviews for the job you dreamt of with much bigger companies in the upcoming weeks.
2. After getting rejected in an interview, you further lose all the life savings you invested in a company due to the stock market crash. Your best friend is diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, and tomorrow is again an interview.

Now, In scenario 1, many people will say the stress is much less than scenario 2, so they will be able to stabilize their minds. Ultimately, you’re making an exception. The interview scenario is still the same, but people will not be able to perform well in scenario 2 due to more mental stress and the inability to think properly due to trauma. In short, people will say how one can concentrate in such an extreme scenario? Think about the second scenario carefully. If everything went fine — Your friend cured after a few months, you gained back your money from the stock market. Still, you lost a golden opportunity due to unnecessary mental stress. YOU MADE AN EXCEPTION of considering this scenario worthy enough to over-think. You could have simply analyzed this scenario using the above techniques.

Overthinking really spoils your analytical skills so try to avoid this, think RATIONALLY, and never make an exception. IT DISPROVES THE RULE!