Volume 6 · The Unfinished Syllabus · Essay 12

All-Testing-Is-Testing Fallacy

Bad reasoning rarely announces itself. All-Testing-Is-Testing Fallacy walks in dressed as good sense and leaves with your wallet.

The error is seductive because it imitates a virtue. It sounds like loyalty, or confidence, or common sense. But follow it home and you find it lives in a house with no foundation.

Watch a master carpenter teach an apprentice. He does not lecture; he lets the boy hold the wrong end of the saw until the wood itself becomes the teacher.

Learning is the one wealth that survives every partition of fortune. The idea has done its job if, the next time it happens to you, you smile before you react.