[wyager]

A lot of people on HN consider themselves logical because they know how to work with Boolean logic and they know how to identify some Boolean fallacies (slippery slope, correlation does not imply causation, etc.).

Of course, this is absolutely insufficient for almost any real-world scenario; Boolean logic does not equip one to make probabilistic inferences about the state of the world, which is the best we can do for the vast majority of everyday propositions.

The reality is that "slippery slope" is a very powerful heuristic, correlation correlates with causation, etc. People here often mistakenly think probabilistic arguments are Boolean (e.g. thinking Occam's razor tells you to believe only the most a priori likely hypothesis) or mistakenly think that Boolean arguments can be interpreted probabilistically (e.g. "Correlation doesn't imply causation, so I'm not going to treat this demonstrated correlation as evidence for causation").