Spin, Bullshit, Fallacies, and Conspiracy Theories: a guide to critical thinking

These are the main things I think you need to guard against in order to think properly.  Of course, knowing the facts sometimes helps too. 

By spin I mean attempts to skew your thinking by re-naming things.  For instance, politicians often label changes they want to make reforms, which sounds better than changes.  Lazy journalists then often simply repeat the word reform when describing the proposed changes.  Words are abused like this not only by politicians of every kind but also by advertisers.  A book that is supposed to be good on this kind of thing (I haven't read it yet) is Unspeak by Steven Poole.  He has a blog on the subject. 

By bullshit I mean what Harry Frankfurt talks about in his famous book.  His argument is discussed here, there is a video interview with Frankfurt here, and his appearance on The Daily Show is here.   

At least as good as Frankfurt's essay, and still available free online, is George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," which talks about some of the same ideas.  Also good is Max Black's essay on humbug.  On the word itself, see here and here.

Spin is a deliberate attempt to influence thinking in a less than fully honest way.  It might not be dishonest to give your product, project, or organization an appealing name, but it is not completely frank either.  Bullshit is produced, according to Frankfurt, by people who do not really care about the truth.  They care more about the effect of the sound of their words than they do about those words' actual meaning.  So neither spin nor bullshit is the same as lying, but the more honest you are, the less tolerance you will have for them.  Fallacies, however, can be quite honest mistakes.

By fallacies I mean trains of reasoning that come off the tracks.  There are many different causes of such logical train wrecks.  There are also many different lists of these causes.  Try these: http://www.logicalfallacies.info/, http://www.fallacyfiles.org/howtouff.html, http://www.criticalthinking.org.uk/logicalfallacies.html

There are examples here: http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~benham/funstuff/logical.html, and here: http://www.fallacyfiles.org/examples.html

By conspiracy theories I mean the kind of thing discussed by Richard Hofstadter in his essay on paranoid politics and Amir Butler on paranoia among Muslims.