Tag Archives: #psychology

A Field Guide to Becoming a Reasoning Critical Thinker in a Post Truth World

A Field Guide to Reason: Human Logic, Cognitive Bias, and the AI Mirage

In 2026, the pursuit of truth is no longer a simple matter of “common sense.” We are navigating a world where human biological biases, ancient logical errors, and the “alien” irrationality of Artificial Intelligence have collided.

Many people have “farmed out” their thinking to machines, but those machines have their own systemic flaws—and the strategies used to “fix” them are often just as broken. To maintain your intellectual sovereignty, you must master the five dimensions of modern reason.

Part I: The Field Guide to Logical Fallacies (30 Common “Dirty Tricks”)

Logical fallacies are errors in reasoning that destroy the quality of an argument. Use this list to spot when a conversation is being derailed.

1. The Personal & Origin Attacks

Ad Hominem: Attacking the person’s character rather than their message.
Tu Quoque: Avoiding criticism by pointing out the critic’s own flaws.
Genetic Fallacy: Judging an idea based solely on its source or origin.
The Straw Man: Distorting an argument into a weaker version to easily tear it down.
No True Scotsman: Redefining a group to exclude counter-examples (moving the goalposts).

2. The Emotional Appeals

Appeal to Emotion: Using fear, pity, or anger instead of facts to win.
Appeal to Pity: Invoking sympathy for a hardship to support an unrelated claim.
Appeal to Fear: Scaring the audience into agreement by exaggerating threats.

3. Authority & Tradition

Appeal to Authority: Using an expert’s opinion as proof without supporting evidence.
Bandwagon Fallacy: Assuming something is true because it is popular.
Appeal to Tradition: Claiming something is right because it’s “how we’ve always done it.”
Appeal to Novelty: Arguing that something is superior simply because it is new.
Personal Incredulity: Rejecting an idea because you find it hard to understand.

4. Data, Cause & Probability

Hasty Generalization: Drawing a sweeping conclusion from a tiny, anecdotal sample.
Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc: Assuming that because B followed A, A must have caused B.
The Texas Sharpshooter: Cherry-picking data to fit a story while ignoring the rest.
Gambler’s Fallacy: Believing that past independent events affect future probability.
Burden of Proof: Claiming something is true because it hasn’t been proven false.
False Analogy: Comparing two things that aren’t truly alike.

5. Diversion & Balance

Red Herring: A distraction masquerading as a relevant point to shift the topic.
False Dilemma: Presenting two extreme options as the only possibilities.
Slippery Slope: Insisting that one small step will inevitably lead to a catastrophe.
Loaded Question: A “trap” question that contains a built-in presumption of guilt.
Argument from Ignorance: Claiming truth because something hasn’t been proven otherwise.
Argument to Moderation: Assuming the truth lies exactly in the middle of two extremes.

6. Linguistic & Circular Games

Begging the Question: A circular argument where the conclusion is assumed in the premise.
Equivocation: Using the same word in two different ways to mislead.
Non-Sequitur: A conclusion that simply does not logically follow from the premise.
Sunk Cost Fallacy: Arguing to continue a path simply because of past investment.
The Fallacy Fallacy: Assuming a claim is false simply because it was argued poorly.

Part II: The Engine Room (15 Mappings of Bias to Fallacy)

Cognitive biases are the biological “bugs” in our brain’s software. They predispose us to commit the fallacies listed above.

Cognitive Bias	Linked Fallacy	The Connection
Confirmation Bias	Cherry-Picking	We seek only the info that confirms our existing “pattern.”
Anchoring Bias	Part/Whole Fallacy	Our judgment is “stuck” to the first piece of info we encounter.
Hindsight Bias	Historian’s Fallacy	We retroactively assume the past was more predictable than it was.
Availability Heuristic	Hasty Generalization	We think something is common just because it’s “vivid” in our memory.
Sunk Cost Bias	Sunk Cost Fallacy	We irrationally weigh past effort over future utility.
Bandwagon Effect	Ad Populum	We equate the “majority view” with the “correct view.”
Authority Bias	Ad Verecundiam	We overvalue titles and credentials over raw evidence.
In-Group Bias	No True Scotsman	we protect our “tribe” by moving the goalposts for outsiders.
Belief Bias	Fallacy Fallacy	We accept a bad argument if we like the conclusion it reaches.
Projection Bias	Psychologist’s Fallacy	We assume everyone else shares our specific mental state.
Stereotyping	Genetic Fallacy	We judge an idea based on the “group” it belongs to.
Outcome Bias	Post Hoc	We judge the quality of a decision based solely on the result.
Dunning-Kruger	Personal Incredulity	Our lack of skill in an area makes us unable to see our own errors.
False Consensus	Ad Populum	We overestimate how much people agree with us.
Halo Effect	Non-Sequitur	We let one positive trait (like beauty) color our entire judgment.

Part III: The Sophisticated Nuance (6 Truths of Logic)

Mastery of reason means knowing when the “rules” of logic are actually flexible.

Context is King: Many “fallacies” are actually valid in certain contexts. Deferring to a scientific consensus (Appeal to Authority) is a sound way to handle uncertainty.
The Power of the Enthymeme: Humans naturally omit “obvious” premises for efficiency. If you attack every incomplete sentence as a “Non-Sequitur,” you aren’t being logical—you’re being pedantic.
Fallacy-Hunting as a Weapon: Over-naming fallacies is often a form of poor reasoning used to stifle debate and avoid engaging with real-world inductive evidence.
Bad Arguments ≠ Wrong Conclusions: A person can argue for the truth using a fallacy. Don’t dismiss a true fact just because the person speaking it is a poor advocate.
Taxonomy is Arbitrary: Logical “rules” are cultural artefacts. What the West calls an “Appeal to Tradition,” other cultures call “Cultural Continuity.”
Fallacies are Adaptive: We aren’t “bad at logic”; we are “good at survival.” Our biases were designed to help us make split-second decisions in a dangerous world.

Part IV: The Silicon Mirror (6 Truths of AI Reasoning Bias)

AI does not think like a human. It has “alien” biases rooted in its code and architecture.

Position Bias: LLMs overemphasise information at the start and end of a prompt. Important evidence “buried in the middle” is often ignored by AI reasoners.
Alien Irrationality: AI doesn’t have “emotions,” but it has “probabilistic bias.” It gives inconsistent answers to logic puzzles because it predicts tokens rather than understanding concepts.
Linguistic Neocolonialism: AI models are biased toward English- and Western-language data. Reasoning in non-Western languages or cultural contexts is significantly less accurate.
AI-AI Bias: Models have been found to favour machine-produced text over human-produced text, risking a self-reinforcing loop that disadvantages human creativity.
The Interpretability Paradox: “Fixing” an AI bias often introduces new ones. Debiasing a model for social fairness often degrades its performance in math and technical logic.
Intrinsic Stereotypes: Social biases are baked into the “embeddings” of AI architecture. Fine-tuning offers surface-level fixes, but the deep stereotypes persist under the hood.

Part V: The Mitigation Mirage (6 Truths of “Fixing” AI)

When tech companies claim they have “debiased” AI, the reality is far more complicated.

The Impossibility of Total Fairness: You cannot satisfy all fairness metrics at once. Fixing one group’s bias often accidentally increases rejections for another group.
Internal vs. External Fixes: Telling an AI “don’t be biased” (prompting) is fragile. Editing the model’s “brain” (Concept Editing) is better, but it often makes the model less accurate overall.
Ethical Imperialism: AI mitigation tools export Western values. A “fair” model in New York may be deeply biased and harmful when deployed in an African healthcare setting.
Bias Washing: Companies often use cheap audits to claim their AI is “fair” while avoiding the expensive work of fixing the underlying data or architecture.
The RLHF Trap: “Human-in-the-loop” governance often just entreats the specific subjective biases of the human curators who are training the AI.
Model Drift: AI logic is not “set-it-and-forget-it.” As models ingest new data, old biases resurface, requiring a constant (and often ignored) cycle of expensive monitoring.

Conclusion: The Reasoning Architect

In 2026, the goal of learning logic isn’t to “win” every argument. It’s to avoid the “mud-wrestling” pits of misinformation altogether.

By understanding these 30 fallacies, the 15 biases that fuel them, the 6 philosophical nuances, and the 12 flaws of AI and its mitigation, you move from a consumer of information to a being a Reasoning Critical Thinker.

Bookmark this guide, value nuance. Remember: the goal of logic isn’t to win, it’s to see the world as it truly is.

‘Clowns to the left of me
Jokers to the right
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you‘
Lyric from: ‘Stuck In The Middle With You’
Written by: Joe Egan, Gerald Rafferty

Your Brain Isn’t Broken. It’s Creative

The Engine and the Armour: A Truer Story of Creativity

It starts with profound curiosity doesn’t it? That low-level hum beneath the surface of things. The sense that you can’t quite switch your own brain off. You’re in the supermarket, trying to remember if you need milk, but you’re also cataloguing the precise tone of fluorescent hum from the overhead lights, the discordant percussive rhythmic rattle of trolley wheels, and the quiet, tragic history etched on the face of the man staring at the price of coffee. For many, this is just background noise and mindless distraction. For you, it’s the entire orchestra, and you’re standing right in front of the brass section.

This isn’t a poetic exaggeration; it’s a neurological reality. Your brain isn’t just passively receiving more data; it’s wired for a different kind of processing. We now understand this as a dynamic, chaotic dance between three key neural networks. There’s the Default Mode Network (DMN), the brain’s dreamer, spinning daydreams and forging wild connections. There’s the Executive Control Network (ECN), the project manager, trying to focus and evaluate those ideas. And mediating between them is the Salience Network, the scout that constantly scans the horizon, deciding what’s interesting enough to deserve your attention.

In many creative people, the connectivity between these networks is unusually high. The dreamer and the manager are in a constant, frantic conversation, and your scout is working overtime. This is the very mechanism that allows you to see patterns others miss. It’s also why it feels like you can’t turn it off. But to frame this experience purely as a burden is to tell only half the story. The truth is far more powerful.

Chapter 1: The Addictive Pull of Deep Focus

Here’s the part the tragic artist myth always leaves out. The reason you can’t switch off isn’t just some curse. It’s because, when channelled, that relentless mental energy triggers one of the most powerful and rewarding states a human can experience: flow. Coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow is that sacred state of total immersion where time dissolves, your sense of self evaporates, and the act of creating becomes its own magnificent reward. It’s what makes the process autotelic, the joy is in the doing, not the done.

This isn’t just a feeling; it’s a neurochemical cascade. Theories like Self-Determination Theory tell us that we are intrinsically motivated by a need for autonomy, competence, and connection. The creative act is a direct line to satisfying those needs. As you engage, your brain rewards you with dopamine surges in the striatum, reinforcing the behaviour and making it deeply pleasurable. This is what makes creativity addictive in the best possible way, not just an obligatory coping strategy. You’re not just offloading sensory data to survive; you are chasing the profound, intrinsically rewarding high of mastery. It’s a private, powerful truth. Which makes the public lie we’re told all the more infuriating.

Chapter 2: The Lie of the Lone Genius

Our culture loves a simple hero narrative, doesn’t it? The lone genius, struck by a bolt from the blue, toiling in a dusty garret to produce a masterpiece all on their own. It’s a romantic story. It’s also a convenient and profoundly damaging lie. The truth is that creativity isn’t a solo performance; it’s a team sport. It’s what Brian Eno, a master of these things, brilliantly termed ‘scenius’.

The polar opposite of genius scenius is the idea that groundbreaking work emerges not from a single mind, but from the collective intelligence and energy of a scene. Think of the Bloomsbury Group, tearing up the literary rulebook over tea and fierce arguments. Think of the punk scene in 1970s London, a glorious, feedback-drenched conversation happening in grubby pubs and rehearsal rooms. Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in conversation, in collaboration, in the fertile friction of minds rubbing up against one another.

So why does the myth of the lone genius persist? Because it’s incredibly useful. It serves a clear economic and social function. A single, tortured genius is a simple, compelling product to market. A collaborative, messy ‘scenius’ is not. More insidiously, it atomises us. By telling creatives they should be toiling away alone, it keeps them disconnected, less powerful collectively, and far easier to exploit in industries built on precarious, gig-based work. It allows a small group of cultural gatekeepers to bestow the ‘genius’ label, maintaining a power structure that is far from meritocratic. The myth of the lone genius isn’t just wrong; it’s a cage with no bars, designed to keep us from realising our collective strength.

This is why the composition of a ‘scenius’ is so critical. A homogenous scene is a stagnant one. If everyone in the room comes from the same background, shares the same reference points, and holds the same assumptions, you don’t get innovation—you get an echo chamber. The cultural river becomes dangerously shallow. True, world-changing creativity is almost always the product of friction between different perspectives and experiences. Fighting for genuine diversity and inclusion in our creative fields isn’t just a moral good; it is a strategic imperative for any culture that wants to progress.

Chapter 3: An Engine for Growth, Not Just Survival

So yes, the cost can be brutal. That survey finding 73% of musicians experience anxiety and depression is real and it matters. But it’s a profound mistake to see art only as a coping mechanism for trauma. While it absolutely can be a powerful therapeutic tool, its purpose extends far beyond mere survival. To create is to experience a unique form of well-being, what the Greeks called “eudaimonia”—the joy that comes from living a life of purpose and growth.

In an age where artificial intelligence can generate slick, novel content in seconds, this distinction has never been more vital. AI can replicate patterns, but it cannot replicate the messy, embodied, human experience that gives art its soul. It hasn’t felt heartbreak or stood in a supermarket overwhelmed by the sheer chaos of existence. Our creativity, our ability to connect, to feel, to find meaning in the chaos, is not just a nice-to-have. It is our last truly wild resource, and our most valuable strategic asset.

The Pragmatic Path: How to Service the Engine

Understanding all this is one thing. Living it is another. In an economy increasingly dominated by AI, nurturing our uniquely human creativity isn’t a soft skill; it is the most important work we can do to make ourselves indispensable. It’s not enough to validate the feeling of being overwhelmed; we need a practical toolkit to navigate it. If your creativity is an engine, not a curse, then it requires maintenance. This isn’t about suppressing your nature; it’s about learning how to handle a high-performance machine without burning out.

First, practise neurological hygiene. Your hyper-aware brain is taking a constant beating. Mindfulness isn’t some fluffy wellness trend; it’s a direct intervention. Start small. Ten minutes of deep breathing before you even look at a screen creates a vital buffer. A body scan, where you simply pay attention to physical sensations from your feet upwards, can ground you when your mind is racing. This activates your parasympathetic nervous system—the body’s own braking mechanism—and gives you a moment of quiet agency in the storm.

Second, build resilience through radical self-compassion. The “lone genius” myth leaves no room for failure, which is, of course, the most essential part of the creative process. Reframe your inner critic. Instead of seeing a failed experiment as a personal failing, see it as data. Keep a journal of small wins. When you feel that familiar pang of alienation, pause and remind yourself: “This feeling is a known occupational hazard for people like me. I am not alone in this.” This isn’t self-indulgent; it’s a strategic move to build the emotional stamina you need for the long haul.

Third, defend your environment. In 2025, our attention is the most valuable commodity on earth, and everything is designed to steal it. You have to fight back. It’s not optional. Establish non-negotiable digital boundaries. Have screen-free times or zones. Crucially, get outside. Spend time in nature—forest bathing, a walk by the sea—to recalibrate your senses away from the urban assault. Counterintuitively, the best way to refuel your creativity is often to engage in low-pressure hobbies entirely unrelated to your main work. Cook a meal, fix a bike, do something with your hands that has no audience and no stakes.

Fourth, actively build your ‘scenius’. Don’t wait for community to find you. Seek out artist groups, online or in person. Share your work, but more importantly, share your process and your struggles. Find a mentor. Offer to mentor someone else. Start a collaborative project with the sole aim of distributing the cognitive load and sparking unexpected ideas. Connection is the antidote to the existential drain of feeling like you’re the only one seeing the world this way.

Finally, look after the machine itself. The link between mind and body isn’t mystical; it’s physiological. You cannot sustain high-level creative output on a diet of caffeine, booze, digital dopamine or anxiety. Prioritise sleep as if it were a critical project deadline, because it is. Move your body in a way that feels good, not punishing. And if the overload becomes chronic and debilitating, seek professional support. Finding a therapist who specialises in the mental health of creative people isn’t an admission of defeat; it’s an intelligent investment in your most valuable asset.

Your creativity is not just your armour against an overwhelming world. It is the very engine that propels you through it. Our job is not to wish for a different, simpler brain, but to learn how to service the magnificent, complex, and powerful one we have.

Your Brain Isn’t Broken, It’s Being Hijacked

You feel it, don’t you? That low, constant hum of discontent, existential horror and the need to express your agitation. The feeling that you are being played.

I remember a late-night scrolling session, the blue light of my laptop on my face, safe in the darkness, my finger hovering over the ‘share’ button. An article, crafted with surgical precision to ignite my particular progressive political sensibilities, had sparked the familiar fire of indignation. I was ready to join the digital mob. I paused. A few minutes later, I saw a friend from the opposite end of the political spectrum share a story that was a perfect mirror image of my own: the same outrage, the same certainty, just aimed at a different target. We were two soldiers unwittingly enlisted in a war we didn’t start, using ammunition handed to us by unseen arms dealers, convinced of our own unique righteousness. We had both taken the broligarchy’s shilling and were aiding and abetting authoritarian politicians whilst making money for digital anarcho-capitalists.

This isn’t an accident. It’s a business model.

Fear is profitable, and in the modern world, it has become the weapon of choice. It’s a hijack of the amygdala skillfully engineered by the algorithm that knows your outrage better than you do, by the political strategist who knows fear generates more clicks than hope. But the true antagonist isn’t just the machine; it’s the ghost in our own machine, our terror of boredom, our craving for the easy hit of validation, our primal need to belong to a tribe. The machine is only powerful because we let it exploit the vulnerabilities within us.

This is the backdoor the outrage machine uses to get inside your head. It doesn’t just hijack your morals; it hijacks your neurochemistry. Your dysregulated dopamine system isn’t a personal failing; it’s the battlefield where the war for your attention is fought and won.

I learned this firsthand after a few days with no internet and no roaming data in the Highlands. Stripped of all stimulation, my mind felt like a cornered animal. But when I returned, something had fundamentally reset. A tedious data entry task I’d been dreading suddenly felt absorbing. I worked for hours, not out of discipline, but because the work itself had become the reward. My dopamine system had recalibrated. Chronic overstimulation floods your brain, desensitising your reward receptors until only the biggest, fastest hit will do. The retreat, by stripping that away, allowed my sensitivity to return. The small reward of making progress was suddenly enough.

So, how do we fight back without retreating from the world and throwing our phones and laptops into the nearest Loch, river or sea? You learn to tend to your inner world, just as a gardener tends to their soil. You start by Gating your inputs, deciding consciously whether to feed your own creativity or the outrage machine. You Allocate sacred time to hear your own voice above the noise, guarding it like a ritual. This allows you to Retreat into solitude, where you can find the answers the machine doesn’t want you to have. You learn to Dump the mental clutter it injects, and Engage the slow part of your brain—the deep, focused network that dopamine hijackers cannot touch. And finally, you Nurture your ‘no’ muscle, because every ‘no’ to a distraction is a ‘yes’ to your own sovereignty.

This practice rewires you. You learn to embrace “boring breaks”, staring out a window instead of at a screen. Listen to and enjoy the quiet sounds of life and nature. Savour the moments you inhabit, resisting the reflex to fill them with productive screen work, research or digital distraction. This feels agonising at first because your brain is screaming for a dopamine hit. Push through. This discomfort is the feeling of your reward system resetting. The goal is a focus so deep it feels effortless.

This isn’t about blissful detachment from the world’s problems. It’s about earning the resilience to engage with them effectively. It’s about building an inner foundation so solid you can have a difficult conversation without losing your centre. It is the quiet power of knowing your own mind in a world of noise, so that when you choose to act, you do so from a place of deep integrity, not manipulated rage.

This is the choice: be defined by what you are against, your energy siphoned off into battles designed to keep you distracted. Or build something real inside yourself.

Because if you don’t value something more than you hate, you will always become what you hate.

To become what you hate is the ultimate surrender. But to build yourself from the inside out is the ultimate victory. The reward isn’t just focus; it’s a quiet integrity. It’s the ability to hold compassion for others without losing your own centre. It is the unshakable confidence of knowing that your mind, your attention, and your soul are your own.

Quentin Budworth

Lens-based artist, writer and musician.