The danger isn’t just sloppy reasoning — it’s outsourcing reasoning.
We live in a time when “fact-checkers” and “explainers” do the thinking for us. Epictetus would roll his eyes: if you don’t regulate your own mental green light, you’ve already surrendered your freedom.
📌 Letting others think for you is the most seductive logical fallacy of all.
⬖ Highlighting the modern risk of second-hand reasoning at Frequency of Reason: bit.ly/4jTVv69
I'm not averse to fact-checkers as such, particularly in areas where I’m unlikely to develop sufficient expertise ie climate science. I'm trying to think of Bertrand Russell’s heuristic for expertise, as I think it might be appropriate here, but the wording is not coming to mind.
The danger isn’t just sloppy reasoning — it’s outsourcing reasoning.
We live in a time when “fact-checkers” and “explainers” do the thinking for us. Epictetus would roll his eyes: if you don’t regulate your own mental green light, you’ve already surrendered your freedom.
📌 Letting others think for you is the most seductive logical fallacy of all.
⬖ Highlighting the modern risk of second-hand reasoning at Frequency of Reason: bit.ly/4jTVv69
I'm not averse to fact-checkers as such, particularly in areas where I’m unlikely to develop sufficient expertise ie climate science. I'm trying to think of Bertrand Russell’s heuristic for expertise, as I think it might be appropriate here, but the wording is not coming to mind.