cognitive fallacies — 1 thorough investigation

cognitive fallacies, as a phrase, sounds, to my ear at least, like the name of a small artisanal coffee shop chain in brooklyn. a thorough investigation has now confirmed it is, in fact, not a coffee chain. it is, instead, a category in psychology that quietly contains most of my recent decisions and at least two of my older friendships.

i am writing this from the desk at 11:23, while carla sits in an annual planning meeting on the third floor with the door closed and a thermos that has its own zip code. the morning gives me about an hour, which is generous by the standards of a building that schedules training sessions with no agenda. i am using the hour to investigate a vocabulary word that has been following me around like a small bored dog.

the trigger was sarah, who came by the corner bar last week for exactly forty minutes between a half-marathon brief and a flight, sat next to mike, ordered the cheaper of two beers, and used the words “logical fallacy” in a sentence that ended with my name. she did not say it cruelly. she said it the way a doctor reads a chart. mike, noted in passing, did not look up.

1. cognitive fallacies, brief

the difference between a bias and a fallacy is the difference between a slope and a broken stair. confirmation bias, the pillar example we keep coming back to in this investigation, is a tilt: the brain leans toward what it already believes. a fallacy is more architectural. it is a stair that looks like a stair until you put weight on it and you are sitting on the floor with your tea.

logical fallacies — ad hominem, straw man, appeal to authority, false dilemma, slippery slope — were named centuries ago by men with beards and sandals. cognitive fallacies are the modern relabel. cognitive biases and fallacies share a neighborhood in the brain but they pay different rents. a fallacy is something you can diagram on a napkin. a bias is something you cannot, because the napkin is also biased.

the cognitive fallacies list is long enough to be its own pamphlet. i am not making the pamphlet. i am making, instead, a personal version: five fallacies that live in my kitchen, drink my coffee, and have opinions about my furniture. (the broader list of biases sits in a separate folder so the labels do not start fighting.)

before the list, the disclaimer. i am not a logician. the closest i get to logic is the spreadsheet i open and immediately minimize. a sound fallacies and cognitive biases tour by an actual logician would include diagrams. mine includes mike, who, when i tried to explain “appeal to authority”, said, “yeah, okay” and signaled for the bill.

2. fallacy one, the wip 2022 will be done

the first fallacy is the one i live in. it has a name in the literature, which i’m fairly sure exists, though i could not find it in the manual frasier would have referenced if frasier had been about adulting instead of opera. the technical name is something close to “appeal to future self.” the practical name is the wip 2022 list.

the wip 2022 list is a notebook, a spreadsheet, and, briefly, an app. it contains eleven items i intended to finish in 2022. it is now a museum. every january i tell myself this is the year. every march i upgrade the notebook. the fallacy is the structural assumption that because i can imagine a finished version of the wip 2022 list, the finished version will, by some natural law, occur.

this is not a bias. a bias would be believing the list is shorter than it is. a fallacy is the broken stair: the argument “i meant to” does not produce the conclusion “therefore it will be done.” it produces the conclusion “therefore it remains, on the desk, looking at me.” the wip 2022 will be done is a sentence with the grammar of a fact and the truth value of a wish.

3. fallacy two, sarah was there briefly

the second fallacy is built around sarah’s visit. sarah and the pension she understands came to the corner bar, sat for forty minutes, and left. in the version i told dave the next morning, sarah was “there for a while.” in the version i told mom on the sunday call, sarah “stopped by.” in the version that lives in my head, sarah “came down to see me.” these are three increasingly generous edits of the same forty minutes.

this is a textbook ad hoc fallacy, which is when you adjust the premise after the fact to make the conclusion you already drew look reasonable. the conclusion was: people come to see me. the premise had to be retroactively expanded from “forty minutes between two flights” to “an evening.” mike, who was present for the full forty minutes and who has not filed his taxes since 2019, said nothing during any of the three retellings, which is its own form of testimony.

sarah ordered the cheaper beer, asked one question about my apartment, listened to the answer for approximately the length of the answer, and did not stay for a second beer. these are the data points. the fallacy is what i did with them after she paid her half of the tab and walked back into the rain.

4. fallacy three, the seventh microwave was the last

the third fallacy is the seventh microwave. i have, at last count i keep running, killed seven of them. after the sixth, i stood in the kitchen and announced — out loud, to a room with a fern in it — that the sixth was the last. the seventh, when it arrived, was hosted in my apartment under the same announcement, recycled, with the number incremented. the eighth microwave will arrive under a similar press release.

this is the gambler’s fallacy with appliances. the gambler’s fallacy says the next coin toss is “due” to come up tails because the last six were heads. the seventh microwave fallacy says the next microwave is “due” to last because the previous six did not. the appliance does not know about the previous six. the appliance is sitting in a warehouse in a different state, learning nothing from history.

at 1:38pm yesterday i looked at the current microwave, which has a blinking green light it should not have, and i thought, “this one is different.” this thought has the same structural integrity as a chair made of soup. the chair is, as the take goes, eventually a bar stool, but only if it is a chair to begin with. all chairs are bar stools eventually, which is true and also irrelevant to whether the microwave will live to see the holidays.

5. fallacy four, the third yoga mat was a phase

the fourth fallacy is the yoga mat under the couch from 2023. it is purple. it has been used once, on a tuesday i no longer remember. each time i look at it, i tell myself the yoga mat era was a phase, and the phase is now over, and the mat will be removed next weekend. next weekend has occurred forty-two times since the mat first arrived.

this is the sunk cost fallacy, dressed for a yoga class. the cost of the mat is gone. the cost of moving the mat from under the couch to the donation bin is approximately one minute. the brain treats these two costs as equivalent, which is incorrect. the brain treats them as equivalent because the brain is, in this respect, an idiot.

i am the brain. i am also the room containing the brain. the fallacy is internal. it cannot be outsourced. it can, however, be filmed, which is what the heuristics framework would call “self-monitoring,” and which i call “looking under the couch on a sunday and being disappointed in person.”

6. fallacy five, i am not the example

the fifth fallacy is the most embarrassing. it is the special pleading fallacy. it goes like this: every general rule about adulting applies to other people, but the specific case of me is, somehow, exempt. mike has not filed his taxes since 2019, which is a problem mike has. i have not opened the bank app since the previous fiscal era, which is, somehow, an “approach.”

special pleading is the move where you accept the premise — taxes must be filed, mail must be opened, rent must be paid promptly — and then carve a small, custom exemption for yourself, made of vibes. the exemption has no support beam. it is held up by sentence structure. “i am not the example” is the entire load-bearing argument.

mom, who knew this about me before i did and who calls on sundays, never says it directly. she asks about the apartment. she asks about the unopened mail pile. she does not ask about the bank app. the silence is its own diagnostic. this kind of stupid is durable because it is dressed in a suit. the suit is the special pleading. the stupid is what the suit is hiding. cross-cluster, but adjacent: the stupid file and the cognitive fallacies file share a wall and a vending machine.

7. verdict, the fallacies are friendly

the verdict, after the hour i had: cognitive fallacies are not a problem to be solved. they are a category to be acknowledged, the way you acknowledge that the air fryer was a mistake but you are not throwing it out. the fallacies live here. they have a key. they know where the spare yoga mat is. asking them to leave would be its own fallacy, because they would say yes and then not leave.

the practical use of a cognitive fallacies list, if you live in one of the boxes on it, is that it gives you a vocabulary for your worst arguments. you cannot fix them, exactly. but you can name them, and a named thing is slightly less embarrassing than an unnamed thing that does the same work.

carla just walked past the desk on the way back from the third floor. i minimized this. the annual planning meeting let out at 12:51, which means the rest of the afternoon belongs to me and to the wip 2022 list, which will, of course, be done.

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