A lot of bad thinking involves:
- creating arbitrary mental categories, then addressing each small category with its only parochial answer
- arbitrarily separating things with shared attributes into separate categories
- selective attention
- impatience, intolerance, deciding right away some other idea or person is dumb, unreasonable, or "crazy"
- authority, prestige, and generally judging the speaker instead of the speech
- low standards for what is considered good or succesful