Don’t Wear the Juice
Logical Fallacies & You
Years ago, one of my favorite pieces written with Aaron for Integrated Skills Group was titled Don’t Wear the Juice. It used the absurd but very real story of McArthur Wheeler, a man who believed lemon juice would make his face invisible to bank cameras, as a way to explain what psychologists later labeled the Dunning–Kruger Effect. The story worked because it was memorable, uncomfortable, and immediately recognizable once you understood what was happening.
That article stayed with me, not because it was about psychology, but because it captured something far more practical. It showed how people become confidently wrong, how that confidence hardens, and how it quietly degrades decision-making long before consequences show up in the open.
That piece is the catalyst for this series.
You can read it here: Don’t Wear the Juice – Integrated Skills Group.
At its core, the Dunning–Kruger Effect is not simply about ignorance. It is about the inability to recognize ignorance. Some people lack the tools required to evaluate their own competence, so they mistake certainty for understanding and assertion for proof. The danger is not confidence itself, but confidence that has never been calibrated against reality.
Once you see that pattern, it starts to appear everywhere. It shows up in training culture, in professional advice, in leadership, and in everyday life. The loudest voice in the room is often the least informed. The fastest answer is often the least examined. And the person most convinced they have it figured out is often the person who has not yet asked the hard questions.
This is where logical fallacies enter the picture.
Logical fallacies are the mechanics behind these failures of thinking. They explain why bad ideas feel convincing, why weak arguments sound authoritative, and why people double down when evidence should force a pause. They are not academic trivia or debate tricks. They are tools for navigating a world filled with persuasion, misinformation, and false certainty.
This Earned Edges series is about developing that kind of intellectual edge.
Each article will focus on a single logical fallacy, not as a way to score points in arguments, but as a way to avoid self-deception. The real risk is not being fooled by others. The real risk is being fooled by your own unchecked assumptions, especially when the stakes are high and the margin for error is thin.
If you learn these patterns and take the time to recognize them in your own thinking, you will start to see problems more clearly than most people around you. Not because you are inherently smarter, but because you are more disciplined about how you think, when you slow down, and what questions you ask before committing to an answer.
That discipline is an earned edge.
In the pieces that follow, we will dig into some of the most common and damaging fallacies people encounter every day, including the Appeal to Authority, where credentials replace context, Confirmation Bias, where evidence is filtered to protect ego, the Straw Man, where arguments are distorted instead of addressed, and the Sunk Cost Fallacy, where people cling to bad decisions simply because they have already paid for them.
All of them share a common theme. They feel reasonable in the moment, they reward certainty over humility, and they punish those who fail to slow down and think clearly.
The goal of this series is simple. Learn to spot them early, learn to question them honestly, and above all, learn not to wear the juice.
-Gino