We’re continuing with part 4 & 5 of the Logic School series talking about red herrings.
What is a red herring you might ask?
Essentially, a red herring is when you or someone else introduces something irrelevant into a conversation as a way of avoiding a question or comment.
An example of this would be if someone asks how you are doing and we completely deflect and talk about how we took out the trash this morning.
Why do we do this? There’s the potential we don’t actually know how we’re doing or we don’t know how to talk about it.
Another example would be if you go to the doctor’s office for an ankle injury because you tripped on a dog toy and weight loss advice gets interjected into the conversation. The idea of needing to lose weight for this ankle injury is completely irrelevant because you tripped on the dog toy.
The problem with red herrings is that it perpetuates lies and long-held beliefs.
If we hear something enough times, even if it’s completely irrelevant to us, as with the case of a red herring, you will begin to believe it.
