After reading dozens and dozens of posts and hundreds of comments, it seems to me that a great many people on this forum think that since they figured out TTATT, they must therefore be a highly intelligent and incredibly rational individual. Let me take a moment to congratulate everyone. Its a big step to figure this out - I know.
That said, IT DOESN'T MAKE YOU A GENIUS! Nor does it make you a rational person. In fact, there is a great number of people on this forum who don't seem to understand even the most basic tennants of logic. Ironically, the people who don't understand logic are usually the quickest ones to accuse other people of being "illogical." And, I would venture to guess, almost everyone who has read this far is currently nodding their heads and thinking to themselves - "Yes, there are a lot of people who are bad at logic on this site." - without even the slightest consideration that they may fall into that catagory.
Which brings me to my point: The illusion of superiority. Consider the following:
The Dunning-Kruger effect, named after David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University, occurs where people fail to adequately assess their level of competence — or specifically, their incompetence — at a task and thus consider themselves much more competent than everyone else. This lack of awareness is attributed to their lower level of competence robbing them of the ability to critically analyse their performance, leading to a significant overestimate of themselves.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a slightly more specific case of the bias known as illusory superiority, where people tend to overestimate their good points in comparison to others around them, while concurrently underestimating their negative points. The effect has been shown by experiment in several ways, but in this case Dunning and Kruger tested students on a series of criteria such as humour, grammar, and logic and compared the actual test results with each student's own estimation of their performance.
Those who scored well on these tests were shown, consistently, to underestimate their performance. This is not terribly surprising and can be explained as a form of psychological projection: those who found the tasks easy (and thus scored highly) mistakenly thought that they would also be easy for others. This is similar to the aforementioned "impostor syndrome" — found notably in graduate students and high-achieving women — whereby high achievers fail to recognise their talents as they think that others must be equally good.
More interestingly, and the subject of what became known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, those who scored lowest on the test were found to have "grossly overestimated" their scores.
So all this begs the question, how do you know if you're good at logic or if you're bad at logic? Well, the first question you should ask is yourself is: Do I know what logic is?
I know this seems very basic question but, seriously, take a moment and ask yourself, right now, do you know what the definition of logic is? I'm NOT talking about a synonym like: Logic is thinking rationally. That's just replacing one word with another. I'm talking about an actuall, functional, description that could identify the meaning of logic.
If you can't, don't feel bad. But consider this, whatever grasp you have on logic right now, being able to define what it is would help you use it even better. Because if you can't even define it, how will you be able to identify it when it's being used? Or misused?
Have you ever studied logic?
Do you know anything about the pillars of logic:
Epistemology
Inductive Reasoning
Deductive Reasoning
Abductive Reasoning
Instrumental Rationality
Syllogisms
Logical Absolutes
Synthetic and Analytic Distinctions
If you don't know what these things are - FIND OUT! I promise you, learning a little bit about the methodolgy and sturcture of logic is one of the best things you can do. Its like bumbling through a dark room and someone suddenly flipping on the light. You will see things that you never saw before and you will start learning things you once thought it was impossible to ever know.