Have you ever heard of the fallacy of relative privation? Chances are that you haven’t. However, it’s one of the most common fallacies you’ll ever hear.

The fallacy of relative privation suggests that the opponent’s argument should be ignored because there are more important problems in the world, despite the fact that these issues are often completely unrelated to the subject under discussion.

One common example of this fallacy is the common parentism, “Eat your vegetables, there are starving children in Africa.”

The British have a common name for this fallacy. They call it whataboutery, and as Romesh Ratnesar noted in an article for Time magazine, the common argument goes, “If you are prepared to go to war to protect Libyan civilians from their government, then what about the persecuted in Bahrain?”

And now as the holiday season rolls around, you’ll hear more and more people saying they’re thankful for whatever they have in life. As the common saying goes, “I used to lament having no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.”

Even while more and more people fall victim to this fallacy, we remain unaware of its existence, and that’s dangerous.

When we are unaware of our own fallacies, we fall victim to using them in an attempt to win arguments. There are so many fallacies we don’t understand when we make arguments.

There is the Nirvana fallacy, which relates to comparing realistic things with unrealistic alternatives. This presents a false dichotomy between one solution and one that is clearly better, but unattainable.

Another uncommon fallacy is the ludic fallacy. The term was coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book, “The Black Swan,” with the term ludic coming from the Latin ludus, meaning “play, game, sport or pastime.”

The fallacy can best be defined as the misuse of games to model real-life situations. Essentially, this fallacy is the use of statistics to predict the outcomes of something outside of the realm of chance.

Yet another dangerous fallacy is the mind projection fallacy, which occurs when someone assumes the way they perceive the world is the correct way. That is, someone’s subjective judgements are stated to be inherent properties of an object, rather than being related to their own view of the world.

Being aware of the fallacious ways we think is important to having productive discussion. The more we allow ourselves to succome to fallacies, the further away we move from having these productive discussions.

We are all at the time in our lives when we should be opening our minds, reevaluating our ideas and acknowledging the logical fallacies we can succome to.

We can realize that some of our deeply held beliefs were based on illogical presumptions after all, and though that prospect might seem scary, it’ll bring us closer to the truth.

Alex Bertsch is the opinion editor for The Dakota Student. He can be reached at [email protected].