Before you publish, present, or press an argument, go through it as a hostile reader would, looking for the fallacies and statistical shortcuts you would attack in an opponent, and fix or cut what you find.

How to do it

1. 1Write the argument out in full. Audits of arguments that exist only in your head always pass.
2. 2Go through it with a short, fixed list of the errors you are most prone to, not the whole catalogue. A workable list: Have I described the other side in words they would accept? Is every causal claim more than a correlation? Are my examples typical or merely vivid? Did I pick the time window, baseline, or comparison because it flatters the result? Does any key word change meaning between premise and conclusion? Am I offering two options when there are more?
3. 3For each factual claim, ask what source you would demand if an opponent made it, and check that you have it.
4. 4Swap the sides. Imagine the same argument, with the same kind of evidence, made for a conclusion you dislike. If you would reject it there, you have found a problem here.
5. 5Hand it to someone who disagrees, or at least someone with no stake, and ask them to find the weakest point. Other people are much better at seeing the holes in your reasoning than you are.
6. 6Repair or remove what fails, and lower the confidence of the conclusion to match what remains. An honest "probably" outlasts a refuted "certainly".

When to use it

• •You are about to publish, post, pitch, or file something that others will scrutinize.
• •You feel very sure, the topic matters to your identity or income, and everyone you have shown it to already agrees with you.
• •You have just enjoyed taking apart an opponent's argument and have not yet turned the same tools on your own.

Counters

Evidence and how strong it is

The need for the audit is well established. People readily detect bias in others while judging themselves comparatively free of it, the bias blind spot (Pronin, Lin & Ross 2002), and they evaluate evidence for conclusions they favor less critically than evidence against them. Mercier and Sperber (2011) argue, from a broad review, that human reasoning is better suited to producing arguments for one's side and criticizing other people's than to checking one's own, which explains both why self-audit is hard and why outside review works. The remedy with the best experimental support is the swap-the-sides step: instructing people to consider how they would have evaluated the same evidence had it pointed the other way reduced biased assimilation where a general instruction to "be unbiased" did not (Lord, Lepper & Preston 1984). Knowing fallacy names is a different matter; there is little evidence that it improves reasoning by itself, and motivated reasoners use their sophistication selectively (Kahan et al. 2017). Evidence strength: good experimental support for the underlying biases and for consider-the-opposite; the audit routine as a whole is practitioner advice drawn from editing, peer review, and debate preparation.

1. Pronin, E., Lin, D. Y., & Ross, L. (2002). The bias blind spot: Perceptions of bias in self versus others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(3), 369-381
   Evidence that people see bias in others more readily than in themselves.
2. Mercier, H., & Sperber, D. (2011). Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34(2), 57-74
   The review-based argument that reasoning is better at producing and criticizing arguments in a social setting than at solitary self-correction.
3. Lord, C. G., Lepper, M. R., & Preston, E. (1984). Considering the opposite: A corrective strategy for social judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47(6), 1231-1243
   Experimental evidence that considering how one would judge opposite results reduces biased evaluation, where instructions to be fair do not.
4. Walton, D. (2008). Informal Logic: A Pragmatic Approach (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press
   A systematic account of the common fallacies and of the critical questions that distinguish a fallacious use of an argument scheme from a legitimate one.
5. Kahan, D. M., Peters, E., Dawson, E. C., & Slovic, P. (2017). Motivated numeracy and enlightened self-government. Behavioural Public Policy, 1(1), 54-86
   Evidence that more numerate people can use their skill selectively to defend identity-congruent conclusions; later replications have found the effect smaller and less consistent.