Biases
Biases, and cognitive biases in particular, are rather nasty things: they make your judgment and memory unreliable, and can be used for manipulation (well, that’s what marketing and politics are about). It may be useful to go through a list of cognitive biases and a list of memory biases from time to time, in order to learn or recall them, and possibly to catch them once they will show up. It is virtually impossible to avoid making mistakes if you are doing anything, those memory biases are especially nasty, and it is possible to run into overcompensation, yet there is a hope to overcome at least some of them.
Fallacies
As biases correspond to being a human, fallacies correspond to being stupid (and perhaps ignorant) – so it is easier to work on. There are formal fallacies, which can be ruled out by logic1 alone, and informal fallacies, which bring additional ambiguity. Nevertheless, the examples from a list of fallacies should be useful to go through.
Misconceptions
Those are harder to define, but perhaps even easier to get rid of: it is just about knowledge. One definition would be “an erroneous belief that is currently widely held about a notable topic”, but it is not clear whether things like pseudoscience should be included, so we will put them into a separate group: in most cases they are more obviously erroneous than those listed in the list of common misconceptions from Wikipedia.
Weirdness
There are beliefs — sometimes surprisingly common, and sometimes just hoaxes — which are beyond reason2, so they do not belong here as a checklist. Yet some of them are amusing and may be used to create, say, high fantasy game universes. The relevant lists include topics characterized as pseudoscience, religions and spiritual traditions, and superstitions; superstitions and older religions are used in various movies and games, while pseudoscience makes fine sci-fi movies.
Among less known things, there are modern flat Earth societies, which picture Earth as a disc: with North Pole in the middle, and South Pole being an ice wall. Satellite images of Earth are explained as incorrectly interpreted, moon landings – as a hoax; satellites themselves – as a hoax as well, while their tasks are explained to be achieved by airships. Not the least creative theory, though neither it is the most creative one. But what it provides is inspiration: now you can grab “a brief history of time” for a fine scientific setting and a hang of change in views, then mix in some fantasy and topology to morph it into something amusing, and lose the ends in maths or made up experiments. A list of conspiracy theories would provide an inspiration for explanations, in case if you want it to be based on our world, and you are ready to make up relatively-well-founded universes – something with technomancy, perhaps! Well, there also are other things which may be handy for that, such as obsolete scientific theories and existing fictional universes, but let’s get back to our fallacies.
LessWrong
LessWrong (lesswrong.com) provides a lot of materials on rationality. Although some of them may be rather obvious, they are still interesting to read, and less obvious things are described there as well.
To be precise, there are various kinds of logic, and there are controversies even around mathematical logic – plenty of types of which exist, including amusing ones, such as paraconsistent logic. But classical logic works most of the time and is usually implied.↩
A polite way to say “too dumb to be held by anyone capable of improvement”.↩