A reference for better arguments.

Ad Hominem

Attacking the person making an argument instead of the argument itself.

Anecdotal Evidence

Drawing a general conclusion from a single story or personal experience.

Appeal to Authority

Using a person's status as proof of a claim, instead of the evidence behind the claim.

Appeal to Emotion

Substituting an emotional reaction for an argument about the facts.

Appeal to Ignorance

Treating the absence of evidence against a claim as evidence for it, or vice versa.

Appeal to Nature

Treating "natural" as evidence that something is good or safe, and "unnatural" as evidence that it is harmful.

Appeal to Tradition

Treating the age of a practice as the justification for it, rather than as one weak piece of evidence.

Bandwagon

Treating how many people believe a claim as evidence that the claim is true.

Broken Window Fallacy

Counting the visible benefits of an event while ignoring what the same resources would otherwise have done.

Cherry Picking

Presenting only the evidence that supports your case and ignoring the rest.

Circular Reasoning

Supporting a claim with the claim itself, dressed up in different words.

Equivocation

Using a word in two different senses within the same argument, as if they were the same.

Fallacy Fallacy

Concluding that a claim is false because the argument offered for it was flawed.

False Cause

Concluding that one thing caused another based on correlation or sequence alone.

False Dichotomy

Framing a choice as two options when more exist.

False Equivalence

Treating two things as equivalent when they differ in ways that matter to the argument.

Genetic Fallacy

Judging a claim by its source, origin, or history instead of its content.

Hasty Generalization

Drawing a broad conclusion from a sample too small or unrepresentative to support it.

Loaded Question

Asking a question that smuggles in an unproven assumption the answerer can't address without conceding it.

Middle Ground

Assuming the truth must lie halfway between two positions, simply because those are the two positions on offer.

Nirvana Fallacy

Rejecting a workable option because it falls short of a perfect one that is not actually available.

No True Scotsman

Redefining a category on the fly to exclude counterexamples, protecting a claim about the category.

Post Hoc

Assuming that because one thing followed another, the first caused the second.

Red Herring

Introducing an irrelevant topic to distract from the actual argument.

Slippery Slope

Claiming a small step will inevitably cause a chain of extreme consequences, without showing why.

Special Pleading

Applying a standard generally, then inventing an exception for your own case with no principled reason behind it.

Straw Man

Replacing someone's argument with a weaker version, then knocking down the weaker version.

Tu Quoque

Dismissing a critique by pointing out that the critic is guilty of the same thing.

Anchoring

Letting an initial number or reference point pull later judgments toward it, even when that starting point is arbitrary.

Availability Heuristic

Judging how likely something is by how easily examples come to mind.

Confirmation Bias

The tendency to notice, remember, and trust evidence that supports what you already believe.

Dunning-Kruger Effect

A pattern where people with limited competence in a domain tend to overestimate their ability in that domain.

Fundamental Attribution Error

Explaining other people's behaviour by their character while explaining your own by circumstances.

Gambler's Fallacy

Believing that past random outcomes change the odds of future independent ones.

Hindsight Bias

Once an outcome is known, it feels like it was predictable all along, and earlier uncertainty gets remembered as confidence.

Sunk Cost Fallacy

Continuing a course of action because of what has already been spent on it, rather than what it still offers.

Survivorship Bias

Drawing conclusions from the things that made it through while ignoring the ones that didn't.

Dog Whistle

Coded language that carries an extra meaning for a target subgroup while sounding innocuous to everyone else.

Euphemism

Softened language that obscures what is actually being described.

False Balance

Presenting two positions as evenly supported when the evidence behind them is not.

FUD

Seeding vague fear about an alternative instead of making the case for your own option.

Gaslighting

A sustained pattern of denial aimed at making someone distrust their own memory of events.

Loaded Language

Word choice that delivers a verdict before any argument has been made.

Thought-Terminating Cliché

A stock phrase deployed to close a question rather than answer it.

Weasel Words

Vague attributions that imply a claim while leaving the speaker free to deny having made one.

Whataboutism

Deflecting a criticism by raising a different criticism of the critic or their side.

DARVO

Answering an accusation by denying it, attacking the accuser, and recasting yourself as the real victim.

Gish Gallop

Burying an opponent in a flood of claims, too many and too fast to refute in real time.

Kafkatrap

An argument built so that denying the accusation counts as proof of the accusation.

Motte and Bailey

Defending a bold claim by retreating to a weaker, related claim when challenged, then returning to the bold claim later.

Moving the Goalposts

Dismissing evidence that meets your demand, then demanding new, harder evidence.

Sealioning

Hounding someone with relentless, polite requests for evidence to exhaust them rather than to understand.

Shifting the Burden of Proof

Demanding your opponent disprove your claim instead of supporting it yourself.

Base Rate Fallacy

Reading a test result or a piece of evidence without accounting for how common the thing being tested for actually is.

Berkson's Paradox

A filter that selects on two traits at once makes those traits look negatively related inside the selected group.

Correlation Is Not Causation

Treating a statistical association as evidence of cause without ruling out confounders, reverse causation, selection, or chance.

Ecological Fallacy

Concluding something about an individual from a statistic that describes the group they belong to.

Misleading Average

Reporting a mean that hides a skewed distribution, so the average ends up describing almost nobody in the data.

P-Hacking

Running analyses until one crosses the significance threshold, then reporting that one as though it were the only test.

Regression to the Mean

Extreme results tend to be followed by ordinary ones for purely statistical reasons, and that drift gets mistaken for an effect.

Simpson's Paradox

A pattern that holds in every subgroup can reverse once the subgroups are pooled, so the combined number tells the opposite story.

Small Sample Size

Small groups produce more extreme results by chance alone, so they crowd both the top and the bottom of any ranking.

Texas Sharpshooter

Finding a pattern in the data first, then presenting it as the thing you set out to test.