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Tells

A fallacy is a defect in the argument, sitting on the page where anyone can point at it. A bias is a tilt in your judgment, invisible in the text. A tactic is someone triggering that tilt on purpose. This is a guide to all three, and to what you say back.

The grid

Everything here is placed by two questions. Where does the defect live, in the argument or in the head? And how did it get there, by accident or on purpose? A bias is the vulnerability; the tactic beside it is the exploit.

Fallacy

In the argument, by accident

  • Strawman: Refuting a version of the argument that nobody actually made.
  • False dilemma: Presenting two options as if they were the whole field when others exist.
  • Slippery slope: Treating a small first step as though it already contained a distant last one.
  • Ad hominem: Answering the person instead of the thing they said.
  • Appeal to authority: Treating who said it as though it settled whether it is true.
  • Circular reasoning: Assuming the conclusion somewhere in the premises that are meant to support it.
  • Post hoc: Taking one thing following another as evidence that it caused it.
  • No true Scotsman: Saving a general claim from a counterexample by redefining the group.
  • Tu quoque: Treating the speaker's inconsistency as an answer to what they said.
  • Equivocation: Using one word in two senses and carrying the conclusion between them.
  • Appeal to ignorance: Taking the absence of evidence against something as evidence for it.
  • Hasty generalization: Drawing a rule about the many from a handful you happened to meet.
  • Middle ground: Assuming the truth must sit between two stated positions.

Rhetoric

In the argument, on purpose

  • Strawmanning: Choosing the weaker version to argue against because the real one is harder to beat.
  • Whataboutism: Answering a charge by raising someone else's, so the subject changes and looks answered.
  • Glittering generalities: Attaching a claim to words everyone approves of and nobody can pin down.
  • Gish gallop: Burying a rebuttal under more claims than anyone could answer in the time available.
  • Motte and bailey: Advancing a strong claim, then retreating to a modest one when challenged, then advancing again.
  • Loaded question: Building the claim into the question, so any answer concedes it.

Bias

In the head, by accident

  • Anchoring: The first number you hear drags every later estimate toward it, even when you know it is meaningless.
  • Confirmation bias: Searching, noticing and remembering the evidence that fits what you already think.
  • Availability heuristic: Judging how likely something is by how easily an example comes to mind.
  • Availability bias: Overrating what is vivid, recent or heavily covered, because ease of recall is standing in for frequency.
  • Hindsight bias: Once you know the outcome, it feels like it was always the likely one.
  • Dunning-Kruger effect: The skill you would need to see how bad you are at something is the skill you lack.
  • Sunk cost: Continuing because of what you have already spent, which no future choice can recover.
  • Fundamental attribution error: Explaining what other people do by who they are, and what you do by what happened.
  • Bias blind spot: Seeing distortions in other people's judgment and not in your own.
  • Negativity bias: Bad information weighs more than equally strong good information.
  • Representativeness heuristic: Judging how likely something is by how much it resembles your picture of the type.
  • Base rate neglect: Reading specific evidence while ignoring how common the thing was to begin with.
  • Affect heuristic: Letting how you feel about something answer questions about its risks and benefits.
  • Halo effect: One good quality colouring every other judgment about the same person or thing.
  • Planning fallacy: Estimating a job from how it should go, when you have a record of how these actually go.

Exploit

In the head, on purpose

  • Opening high: Naming an absurd first number on purpose, because the whole negotiation will orbit it.
  • Scarcity: Making something look short in supply so that wanting it stops being a decision.
  • Confirmshaming: Wording the decline button so that saying no is an admission about yourself.
  • Reciprocity: Giving something first, because an unpaid obligation is uncomfortable to carry.
  • Social proof: Showing that others are doing it, because uncertainty is resolved by looking sideways.
  • Unity: Persuading from inside a shared identity, where the argument barely has to be made.
  • Foot in the door: Starting with a request too small to refuse, so the large one is consistent with what you already are.
  • Door in the face: Opening with a request designed to be refused, so the real one arrives as a concession.
  • Roach motel: Making it easy to get into something and deliberately hard to get out.
  • Drip pricing: Revealing the cost in stages, once the decision already feels made.
  • Gaslighting: Undermining someone's confidence in their own memory so that your account stands by default.

On the seam

Either, depending on who is doing it

  • Survivorship bias: Reasoning from the cases that made it through, because the ones that did not are not there to look at.
  • Cherry-picking: Showing the evidence that supports the case and leaving out the evidence that does not.
  • False balance: Giving two sides equal weight when the evidence behind them is nothing like equal.

Some entries genuinely straddle. Survivorship bias is usually nobody's fault and sometimes a chosen sample, and the page cannot tell you which. Those sit on the seam.