[tokenadult]

Just so. (My late dad was an industrial engineer whose recreational reading was all about the philosophy of science, so I grew up in a home with logic textbooks on the home bookshelf.) Plenty of incorrect arguments encountered here on Hacker News or elsewhere in cyberspace are incorrect not so much because they fit on a checklist of classical logical fallacies, but rather because they are based on false factual premises. One has to keep seeking knowledge of the world to recognize mistaken premises of arguments. One thing I enjoy about Hacker News is that it includes people from all over the world, including people who have seen places I have never seen, and done things I have never done, so that I can learn new facts here as I read discussion threads. That is often every bit as valuable as knowing lists of logical fallacies, although I did do a bit of teaching of formal deductive logic back in the days when I was a high school debate coach.

A previous comment of mine

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5835453

from a thread recommended in another comment on this thread goes into more detail about why logical fallacies are not the only problems to look for when evaluating claims for truth or falsehood.