The human mind is the wonder of wonders — and it works faster than the fastest computer ever made — and it learns from its mistakes, corrects them, and reprograms itself.

- Yesterday we talked about logical thinking — which qualifies you to confront lies, or a sterile, illogical argument — or gives you the ability to think soundly in situations and critical moments — and we went back to a few logical fallacies that some people use to drag you into a whirlpool of lies that affects your decisions. The link to the post is in the first reference for anyone who wants to go back to it.

- Imagine, God forbid, that there is a patient being treated for a deadly disease — and I came and said to him: "Look — there is a new drug — 50% of those who took it died — what do you think about taking it?"

What do you think his answer would be?

Now imagine that I went and said to him: "Look — there is a new drug — half of those we gave this drug to got better and became like a horse — what do you think about taking it?"

By the way, it is the very same sentence — but reversed in the way it is presented. This made one that you accepted with relief and happiness and agreed to take the drug — and the other made you recoil from it completely.

Your reaction changed completely — even though it is in reality the same sentence — but it was presented in a "negative" or "positive" way. This is called "The framing effect."

Are you someone who minds your system and takes care of your health? What do you think — what will you buy? A burger box labelled "25% fat"? Or "75% fat-free"?

It is the very same amount of fat — but the effect of framing the idea made you accept it once — and reject it once.

This is what we call in colloquial speech "the half-full glass and the half-empty glass."

- You accept the positive because the human mind is designed that way — it leans towards the positive and recoils from the negative — unless it is a sick, unsound mind.

So what do I do in order to present negative ideas to you in a form your mind accepts? I must coat them in some way — like bitter medicine pills coated in coloured sugar — you take them and they go deep into you, and then you bare your teeth at their bitterness and ugliness.

So you must take the poison that will be given to you in an acceptable form.

In the form of a "joke" — or the form of "funny comics" on social media — or in the form of a puppet programme that tries to be witty like "Abla Fahita" — or a clown like Bassem Youssef — in the form of a dramatic work — a series — a play — a light sketch — or even a television "advert."

Why does he present you with these programmes, and Bassem Youssef, and the puppet Fahita, and try to be comedic? Here is this surprise:

Among [logical fallacies](https://alaafans.com/series/logical-fallacies "logical fallacies") there is a fallacy called "the Strawman fallacy."

A person takes your deed or your words — and begins to present it in a mocking, comic way that strips it of credibility.

You talk about a conspiracy, so he brings you all the comic jokes in history that have any relation to the subject. You talk about terrorism, so he mocks you. You talk about an achievement, so he links it for you to lines from the comedy film "El-Fankoush."

Notice, with any achievement or work — they rush to look for anything related to it that can serve as comic material. He "strives" to find anything — to turn it into a joke.

He does not discuss the subject at all — he distorts it — and turns it into a jest — and begins to mock. What are you mocking? An achievement?? Is that logical? That people mock progress and achievement?

If he finds nothing, then he will leaf through his old notebooks. The important thing is to broadcast frustration to you and nothing more.

He conveys to you certain negative ideas — and because your mind will reject them — I must give them to you in a way that makes your mind accept them. Laughter.

Through laughter — I will make you hate your life and your country and fall into an endless chain of fallacies, turn you from a successful person into a failure — and if you are not successful, instead of taking your hand towards success I push you to deteriorate — and if you are sane I turn you into a saboteur.

He never tells you anything positive — he never mocks your enemies. He belittles you and only you.

Can you imagine what happens to you???

- There is a video in the second reference of this post — it shows you how they fool you when you go to buy coffee from the famous cafés — and they ask you "a regular size, or a medium, or a large"?

Most people automatically choose the medium because it is "a positive thing" far from "two negative things": the "small" quantity that is not enough for me, and the "large" one of which I will be deprived of a part.

In truth — and try it yourself — the medium size is exactly the same as the small size — and the regular size is exactly the same as the large size. You, sir, are being conned and you are paying more for the same quantity in most of these cafés.

- There is a famous logical fallacy — we drank it in and were raised on it: "The expensive one is worth its price, Buyer's Stockholm Syndrome."

You find a man going to buy a mobile phone for a thousand dollars — and he works as an engineer in a mine. The delicate thousand-dollar phone is of no use to him at all — and is liable to break at any moment — and does not catch a network signal — and is useless.

Even though if he bought a "rugged cellphone" resistant to water and shocks for half the price, he would be the winner — but he does not do that. "He does not weigh it with logic" — he applies the fallacy he drank in: "the expensive one is worth its price."

- "Loaded or charged words" is a common style in dialogue with activists — and drama follows it with you, and the writer uses it in order to plant the idea in your mind as though it were a fact — while the reality is that what he says is not proven at all. The worst part is that it is "impossible to prove."

Exactly like when activists tell you: there are 40 thousand in the prisons. They are not 40,000 — and he does not know their number. He gives you a sentence already charged — so you begin to fall into the fallacy of trying to deny what is unproven.

How did you know there are 40 thousand? Did you count them, I mean did you count them? Do you have a statistic? Where did the media source you took the number from get it? Did he go and count them?

You always hear "the poor" and "the marginalised" and "El-Fankoush" and "failure" in your conversations with activists. These sentences are "charged" and have only one goal: "to leak into your subconscious" and "to charge you up."

- Our minds resort to a certain strategy for solving problems called "Confirmation bias." People always lean towards what they believed and were used to hearing, and lean towards their own experiences or previous expertise on the subject.

Let me give you an example. Come, let me make you choose between an invitation to practise diving with sharks — and an invitation to drink tea on a cattle farm, among these gentle animals, by moonlight.

The majority will choose the cattle farm without hesitation. That is safety — while sharks are deadly, frightening, predatory man-eaters.

The truth is that the number of people killed by sharks around the world annually is on average 4 people — while the number killed by cows annually in the world is 23 people. The cow is classified as a more dangerous creature than the shark.

This is a proven scientific fact.

Logic says that you should choose to be in contact with the less dangerous creature — but you can never change your mind. You carry a huge heritage across the years of "Confirmation bias." Cows are peaceful and give us milk — and sharks are predatory, aggressive killers.

- Into this part comes another strategy that our mind uses — called the "Availability heuristic." What is available to us of examples in our minds is the film "Jaws" and a few incidents we read about of shark attacks — and images and footage of sharks ferociously preying on their victims — but we have no heritage about savage cows, for example — nor images of killer cows that our mind can summon when needed.

You have in your mind a huge heritage of footage from the terrifying film series "Jaws" and the terrifying music of "John Williams" that accompanied the film.

- In a famous English television advert for a "magnetic mattress" — mattresses with magnets buried inside them — it is promoted as curing every disease in history, of course, and giving you energy, activity and vitality. The advert says: "Because it is impossible that more than 4 million Britons are wrong."

All of us, when we sleep, wake up on some days and jump out of bed with activity and vitality, all of us full of energy — and on other days we are unable to get up and we wake up barely. Without magnets or anything else.

A psychiatrist did an experiment and brought these mattresses and removed the magnets from them. He discovered that people still told him: "This is lovely and it really does give energy and vitality"...!

Confirmation bias, the availability heuristic, the affirmation of 4 million human beings before them — and their deep desire to feel that they did not waste their money for nothing — make them remember more the days when they get up with activity, and ignore the days of exhaustion automatically and unconsciously. So the mattress is lovely with or without magnets — even though it has no magnets in it at all...!

That is why it is very rare to find someone who has bought a new car and tells you he does not like it. You only hear "no, it is very good"... and "everybody has one anyway." A logical fallacy with which he defends himself — and protects himself from a premise that would annoy him and make him feel guilty: "you wasted your money on a lousy car."

That is why it is hard to find one of the followers of these activists changing his mind — no matter how much stupidity and contradiction he sees in his icon — because you are, in short, telling him: "You spent five years of your life following an idiot."

Changing one's opinion and admitting error requires "maturity" — and "a thinking mind."

- Teenagers are their main playing field — because the teenager and the young man always lean towards adventure and rushing in — and do not take enough time to think. He imagines that he is immune to all diseases and all kinds of mind games — while he is like any person — exposed to them.

We are still asking: how do you protect yourself from these [logical fallacies](https://alaafans.com/series/logical-fallacies "logical fallacies")?

And we add another question: how do you protect your children and teach them to think logically?

The talk has a conclusion and a final continuation, God willing...

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References:

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1 - https://goo.gl/cCigTz

2 - http://goo.gl/KSQgTi

3 - مرجع بالعربية - بحث مختصر حول [المغالطات المنطقية](https://alaafans.com/series/logical-fallacies "المغالطات المنطقية"): http://www.syr-res.com/article/1288.html

4 - Logically Fallacious: The Ultimate Collection of Over 300 Logical fallacy - Bo Bennett - 2014

5 - An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments: https://goo.gl/gicKnx

6 - The Book of Fallacies: From Unfinished Papers of Jeremy Bentham - 1824

7 - Critical Thinking in Psychology - Robert J. Sternberg, Henry L. Roediger III, Diane F. Halpern - 2007

8 - Thinking for Yourself - Marlys Mayfield - 2014

9 - Rational thinking: a study in basic logic: https://goo.gl/A0taqZ

10 - Simple Formal Logic: With Common-Sense Symbolic Techniques - Arnold vander Nat - 2010