Critical Thinking Skills: Weigh Arguments, Evidence, and Your Own Biases

How do you know whether to believe what you just read, heard in a meeting, or were told by a friend? Critical thinking is the answer to that question: a set of habits for taking any claim apart, checking what holds it up, and deciding how much weight it deserves. This path teaches you those habits one at a time. You will learn to find the premises and conclusion of an argument, spot the assumption it leaves unsaid, and tell a valid argument from a sound one. You will learn to name the common fallacies—ad hominem, straw man, false dilemma, slippery slope and more—and to see why a flawed argument does not make its conclusion false. You will learn to read evidence: whether a source is in a position to know, why an anecdote is not data, why a correlation is not a cause, and how base rates and sample size change what a result means. Then you will turn the same tools on yourself, through confirmation bias, anchoring, overconfidence and the bias blind spot, and the practices that correct them. You will finish by steelmanning views you disagree with, proportioning your confidence to the evidence, and changing your mind when the evidence changes. Every Concept is short, checked with a question, and built on the ones before it. You need no formal logic or statistics—only a claim you care about and the patience to look at it twice.