It is difficult for me to ascertain when the person I am communicating is using a logical fallacy to trick me into believing him or doubting my judgement, even when I realise it hours after the argument.
I have seen countless arguments in Reddit threads and I couldn't figure out who was in the right or wrong unless I looked at the upvote counts. Even if the person is uttering a blatant lie, they somehow make it sound in a way that is completely believable to me. If it weren't for those people that could exactly point out the irrationality behind these arguments, my mind would have been lobotomised long ago.
I do want to learn these critical thinking skills but I don't know where to begin from. I could have all these tips and strategies memorised in theory, but they would be essentially useless if I am not able to think properly or remember them at the heat of the moment.
There could be many situations I could be unprepared for, like when the other person brings up a fact or statistic to support their claim and I have no way to verify it at the moment, or when someone I know personally to be wise or well-informed bring up about such fallacies, perhaps about a topic they are not well-versed with or misinformed of by some other unreliable source, and I don't know whether to believe them or myself.
Could someone help me in this? I find this skill of distinguishing fallacies from facts to be an extremely important thing to have in this age of misinformation and would really wish to learn it well if possible. Maybe I could take inspiration from how you came about learning these critical thinking skills by your own.
Edit: I do not blindly trust the upvote count in a comment thread to determine who is right or wrong. It just helps me inform that the original opinion is not inherently acceptable by everyone. It is up to me decide who is actually correct or not, which I can do at my leisure unlike in a live conversation with someone where I don't get the time to think rationally about what the other person is saying.
Note that a fallacy is a reasoning flaw; sometimes the goal might be to trick you, indeed. But sometimes it's just a brainfart... or you might be dealing with something worse, like sheer irrationality. That said:
Then try to formalise the arguments that you found into "premise 1, premise 2, conclusion" in your head or in a text editor. Are the premises solid? Do you actually agree with them? And do they actually lead into the conclusion? If something smells fishy, you probably got a fallacy.
Get used to at least a few "big" types of fallacies. There are lists across the internet, do read a few of them; you don't need to memorise names, just to understand what is wrong with that fallacious reasoning. This pic has a few of them, I think that it's good reference material, specially at the start:
In special I've noticed that a few types of fallacy are really common on the internet:
There are also some "markers" that smell fallacy for me from a distance. You should not trust them (as they might be present where there's no fallacy, or they might be absent even when the associated fallacy pops up); however, if you find those you should look for the associated fallacy: