"Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end."

Full Disclaimer: I am no award winning Ph.D. holder, I'm just a guy who tries to find the truth in our ever increasingly complex world.

Recently I have been hearing a number of increasingly bad arguments. People are entitled to think whatever they want and this is fine. What is not fine is pushing your flawed agenda on others. For example, you and your friend are talking to your friend and you're trying to explain to him why littering is bad for the environment and he says "well everyone else in the world does it." This argument specifically is called Argumentum ad populum and that right there is textbook a fallacy (A mistaken belief based on unsound judgment). Just because a lot of people believe in a particular ideal doesn't mean that it is necessarily right. It wasn't too long ago that people believed the world was flat and that if you walked too far you could fall off the edge. Clearly, a lot of people believing something doesn't make it true.

So, How do you avoid these silly fallacies? Well, first and foremost it is important to recognize when you have shitty logic? A great way to do this is to ask this simple question "Does this necessarily mean this?" This helps break apart logic that just don't stand its ground under pressure. You should also always try to avoid assuming things you have no evidence of. For example, if you are trying to explain how gravity works, you would explain that "What comes up must come down because of earth's gravitational pull." What you won't add is that there was an evil space demon that makes everything fall because he hates human beings. This is clearly a ridiculous explanation for that specific event but I still see the same ridiculous arguments being thrown around and worst than that being accepted as the truth. One time in one of my internship workshops I asked one of our senior advisors if rating agencies such as Moody's, Standard & Poor, etc. are to be trusted because they rated bad bonds good even though they were very shitty. He then told me "I don't know but everyone follows them so they must be." I was shocked, yet again another example of bad logic. Just because everyone is doing it doesn't mean it's right, and it's that same logic that led to the 2008 stock market crash (People kept purchasing bogus CDO's thinking they were high grade until the default rate reached a historic high.) No, you won't always have the right answer to everything but you should never just assume.

Reason is the hallmark of humanity, it is literally what makes us, well, us. When we use piss poor reasoning we will always end up with piss result.