1. There Are No Teams

There is no “pro-science” or “anti-vax.” There is only pro-truth or anti-truth.


All slogans and labels are meant to divide and discredit. The minute you identify with or fight for one specific team, you’ve surrendered your ability to see truth clearly.

2. Your Only Loyalty Is to Truth

Not to party, tribe, doctor, scientist or "expert".


If you claim to want to know the truth, you must remain genuinely receptive to changing your mind if presented with compelling arguments or evidence. If what you recognize as "truth" requires you to dismiss, ignore or deny the experiences of others, then it must be reexamined.

3. Authority Is Not Earned by Echoing Authority

Repeating headlines, credentials, or “expert consensus” is not debate, it’s obedience.


If you cannot defend your view through coherent logic, lived experience, historical context, and first principles, you are not engaging in discourse, but in dogma.

4. No Ad Hominem, No Arrogance, No Appeal to Shame

Attack the argument, not the arguer.


Name-calling, ridicule, and smug condescension are signs of weakness, not intellect. If your position is strong, it will stand without needing to silence others.

5. Always Interrogate Motive and Cost

Truth-tellers rarely profit. Whistleblowers are often destroyed.


If someone speaks out at great personal cost, with no reward or institutional backing, they must be heard, not crucified. Disagreement is allowed; silencing is not.

6. Once Deception Is Proven, All Claims Must Be Re-examined

The system does not get to lie once and retain your trust.


Any institution, agency or figure that has been caught using deceptive logic, evidence or narratives forfeit the right to be believed without rigorous questioning of everything else they've asserted.

7. Knowledge Is Power. Power Is Not Given Freely.

Any data freely handed down by institutions must be assumed to serve their power, not yours.


Real knowledge requires effort, discernment, and disobedience. What empowers the individual is rarely what is broadcast on screens.

8. Civility Is Not Optional, It’s the Price of Participation

Discourse requires discipline.


If you cannot speak without mocking, labeling, or threatening those who differ, you're not equipped for this conversation.

9. Logic Must Be Fractal, Not Fragmented

A truth that only holds at one scale is not a truth.


Any claim about the body, mind, or reality must hold when zoomed out to history, zoomed in to biology, and echoed across disciplines. Coherence is the test.

10. No One Is Exempt From Questioning, Including You

Your own beliefs must be interrogated just as ruthlessly as others’.


If you are not willing to watch your worldview fall apart in service of truth, you are not seeking truth, you are protecting identity.

Logical Fallacies:

Appeal to authority

You said that because an authority thinks something, it must therefore be true.

It's important to note that this fallacy should not be used to dismiss the claims of experts, or scientific consensus. Appeals to authority are not valid arguments, but nor is it reasonable to disregard the claims of experts who have a demonstrated depth of knowledge unless one has a similar level of understanding and/or access to empirical evidence. However, it is entirely possible that the opinion of a person or institution of authority is wrong; therefore the authority that such a person or institution holds does not have any intrinsic bearing upon whether their claims are true or not.

Ad hominem

You attacked your opponent's character or personal traits in an attempt to undermine their argument.

Ad hominem attacks can take the form of overtly attacking somebody, or more subtly casting doubt on their character or personal attributes as a way to discredit their argument. The result of an ad hom attack can be to undermine someone's case without actually having to engage with it.

Strawman

You misrepresented someone's argument to make it easier to attack.

By exaggerating, misrepresenting, or just completely fabricating someone's argument, it's much easier to present your own position as being reasonable, but this kind of dishonesty serves to undermine honest rational debate.

Special pleading

You moved the goalposts or made up an exception when your claim was shown to be false.

Humans are funny creatures and have a foolish aversion to being wrong. Rather than appreciate the benefits of being able to change one's mind through better understanding, many will invent ways to cling to old beliefs. One of the most common ways that people do this is to post-rationalize a reason why what they thought to be true must remain to be true. It's usually very easy to find a reason to believe something that suits us, and it requires integrity and genuine honesty with oneself to examine one's own beliefs and motivations without falling into the trap of justifying our existing ways of seeing ourselves and the world around us.

Bandwagon

You appealed to popularity or the fact that many people do something as an attempted form of validation.

The flaw in this argument is that the popularity of an idea has absolutely no bearing on its validity.

Black-or-white

You presented two alternative states as the only possibilities, when in fact more possibilities exist.

Also known as the false dilemma, this insidious tactic has the appearance of forming a logical argument, but under closer scrutiny it becomes evident that there are more possibilities than the either/or choice that is presented. Binary, black-or-white thinking doesn't allow for the many different variables, conditions, and contexts in which there would exist more than just the two possibilities put forth. It frames the argument misleadingly and obscures rational, honest debate.

No true scotsman

You made what could be called an appeal to purity as a way to dismiss relevant criticisms or flaws of your argument.

In this form of faulty reasoning one's belief is rendered unfalsifiable because no matter how compelling the evidence is, one simply shifts the goalposts so that it wouldn't apply to a supposedly 'true' example. This kind of post-rationalization is a way of avoiding valid criticisms of one's argument.

Begging the question

You presented a circular argument in which the conclusion was included in the premise.

This logically incoherent argument often arises in situations where people have an assumption that is very ingrained, and therefore taken in their minds as a given. Circular reasoning is bad mostly because it's not very good.

Appeal to emotion

You attempted to manipulate an emotional response in place of a valid or compelling argument.

Appeals to emotion include appeals to fear, envy, hatred, pity, pride, and more. It's important to note that sometimes a logically coherent argument may inspire emotion or have an emotional aspect, but the problem and fallacy occurs when emotion is used instead of a logical argument, or to obscure the fact that no compelling rational reason exists for one's position.

Tu quoque

You avoided having to engage with criticism by turning it back on the accuser - you answered criticism with criticism.

Pronounced too-kwo-kweh. Literally translating as 'you too' this fallacy is also known as the appeal to hypocrisy. It is commonly employed as an effective red herring because it takes the heat off someone having to defend their argument, and instead shifts the focus back on to the person making the criticism.

Burden of proof

You said that the burden of proof lies not with the person making the claim, but with someone else to disprove.

The burden of proof lies with someone who is making a claim, and is not upon anyone else to disprove. The inability, or disinclination, to disprove a claim does not render that claim valid, nor give it any credence whatsoever. However it is important to note that we can never be certain of anything, and so we must assign value to any claim based on the available evidence, and to dismiss something on the basis that it hasn't been proven beyond all doubt is also fallacious reasoning.

The fallacy fallacy

You presumed that because a claim has been poorly argued, or a fallacy has been made, that the claim itself must be wrong.

It is entirely possible to make a claim that is false yet argue with logical coherency for that claim, just as it is possible to make a claim that is true and justify it with various fallacies and poor arguments.

Personal incredulity

Because you found something difficult to understand, or are unaware of how it works, you made out like it's probably not true.

Complex subjects like biological evolution through natural selection require some amount of understanding before one is able to make an informed judgement about the subject at hand; this fallacy is usually used in place of that understanding.

Slippery slope

You said that if we allow A to happen, then Z will eventually happen too, therefore A should not happen.

The problem with this reasoning is that it avoids engaging with the issue at hand, and instead shifts attention to extreme hypotheticals. Because no proof is presented to show that such extreme hypotheticals will in fact occur, this fallacy has the form of an appeal to emotion fallacy by leveraging fear. In effect the argument at hand is unfairly tainted by unsubstantiated conjecture.

Ambiguity

You used a double meaning or ambiguity of language to mislead or misrepresent the truth.

Politicians are often guilty of using ambiguity to mislead and will later point to how they were technically not outright lying if they come under scrutiny. The reason that it qualifies as a fallacy is that it is intrinsically misleading.

Cognitive Bias

Confirmation bias


You look for ways to justify your existing beliefs.


We are primed to see and agree with ideas that fit our preconceptions, and to ignore and dismiss information that conflicts with them. Think of your ideas and beliefs as software you're actively trying to find problems with rather than things to be defended.

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool."
— Richard Feynman

Dunning-kruger effect


The less you know about something, the more confident you’ll be.


Because experts know just how much they don't know, they tend to underestimate their ability; but it's easy to be over-confident when you have only a simple idea of how things are.

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so certain of themselves, yet wiser people so full of doubts."
— Bertrand Russell

Groupthink


You let the social dynamics of a group situation override the best outcomes.


Dissent can be uncomfortable and dangerous to one’s social standing, and so often the most confident or first voice will determine group decisions. Rather than openly contradicting others, seek to facilitate objective means of evaluation and critical thinking practices as a group activity.

In-group bias


You unfairly favor those who belong to your group.


We presume that we’re fair and impartial, but the truth is that we automatically favor those who are most like us, or belong to our groups. Try to imagine yourself in the position of those in out-groups; whilst also attempting to be dispassionate when judging those who belong to your in-groups.

Backfire effect


When core beliefs are challenged, it can cause you to believe even more strongly.


We can experience being wrong about some ideas as an attack upon our very selves, or our tribal identity. This can lead to motivated reasoning which causes us to double-down, despite disconfirming evidence.

"It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so."
– Mark Twain