You will be able to spot three fallacies that move the talk away from the evidence.
Discussions at work and online often drift away from the question that started them. Someone makes a proposal, and the replies end up being about the person, about a more extreme proposal nobody made, or about a choice between two outcomes with every other possibility left out. Each of these is a fallacy, a pattern of reasoning that feels persuasive but does not support its conclusion. Ad hominem, straw man and false dilemma are three that come up constantly at work and online, and all three move the discussion away from the evidence. You will find them in comment sections, office group chats and forwarded messages. Most people who use them don't realise they're doing it, and you will sometimes catch them in your own thinking.
Farhan is a product manager at a fintech firm in one-north. In the team chat, he suggests that the app's sign-up form should drop two optional fields. Within 10 minutes he gets three replies. The first says Farhan has never worked on compliance, so he wouldn't know. The second asks whether the team should just stop collecting data altogether, and calls that reckless. The third says either the form stays as it is or the team fails the next audit. Each reply is a different fallacy, and none of them addresses the two fields themselves.
Ad hominem is Latin for "to the person". An ad hominem reply responds to an argument by attacking the person making it, through their experience, motives, age, background or past mistakes, instead of dealing with what they said. The first reply to Farhan does this. His experience says nothing about whether his argument is correct, because the argument stands or falls on its own. If the two fields are legally required, someone can show that by pointing to the requirement. Farhan's lack of compliance expertise does not make them required.
Some forms are quieter. When the sales team asks for a lower price, someone may say they only want it because they earn commission, though the sales team could have that motive and still be right. A new colleague suggests a change and is told "give him a few months", and the idea is dismissed without anyone examining it. In a multicultural office, ad hominem can turn ugly when a view is dismissed because of where someone studied, how they speak, or which generation they belong to.
Questioning a person's motives can be fair. Lesson 1.2, "Not all evidence weighs the same", suggested asking whether a source has a conflict of interest. If they have one, that is a reason to examine their evidence more closely before you accept it. The fallacy is skipping that check and treating the motive itself as the answer.
A straw man restates someone's position in a weaker or more extreme form, then knocks down that version. The second reply turned "drop two optional fields" into "stop collecting data altogether". It wins easily because the position it attacks is weak and Farhan never proposed it.
Straw men are easy to build by accident. When you disagree with someone, you tend to hear the most extreme version of what they said, and the time pressure of a chat thread makes this more likely, so "fewer fields" becomes "no data" in one step. Before you answer, ask whether the other person would agree with your summary of their view. If they would say "that's not what I said", you are arguing with a straw man. Lesson 2.4, "Respond without winning on technicalities", makes this check a habit by having you restate the other side fairly before answering.
A false dilemma, also called a false choice, presents two options as if they were the only ones when in reality there are more. The third reply gave Farhan's team two outcomes: keep the form as it is, or fail the audit. The team actually has other options. It could remove the fields after checking with compliance first, remove one field and keep the other, show the fields only to certain users, or run the change past the auditors.
False dilemmas persuade because two options are easier to think about than five, and when one of them is clearly bad, the other wins by default. Politicians and managers under pressure use them, as in "Either we hit the launch date or we lose the client." Sometimes a two-option claim like that is true. More often a third path exists, such as a partial launch or an honest conversation with the client about a new date. To break a false dilemma, ask "what else could we do?" and list the options between or beyond the two you were offered. Lesson 6.3, "Widen your options before you choose", turns this question into a method for your own decisions.
These three fallacies work because they swap the real, hard question for an easier one that people can answer instantly, and the easy answer feels like an answer to the original question. In Farhan's chat, the hard question is whether the two fields are needed. You fall for the same swaps yourself for ordinary reasons: judging a person is quicker than judging an argument, defeating an extreme position is more satisfying than engaging with a moderate one, and choosing between two options is less tiring than coming up with more.
When you spot one, the best response is to steer the discussion back to the real question. First work out which fallacy is being used. Then identify the question it avoids. Then reply in a way that returns to that question. A good redirecting reply does not name the fallacy and does not try to score a point.
Farhan could answer the first reply by accepting that he is not a compliance specialist and asking to check whether the two fields are required. To the second, he could clarify that he is only proposing to remove the two optional fields and nothing else. To the third, he could ask whether there are options between keeping the form as it is and failing the audit.
In the activity below you will collect one example of each and rewrite the point as a fair argument.
Find one example of each fallacy in a news comment section, a work thread or a group chat. Then rewrite the point fairly.
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