Keentune

Critical Thinking curriculum

6 chapters
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200 concepts
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free
Everything the adaptive question bank can teach and test in Critical Thinking, from foundations through advanced practice. Work through it in order, or start practising and let the questions find your level.
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A free 9-minute primer — the mental model, the mistakes beginners make, and what to practise first.
A. Named fallacies
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Attacking the arguer instead of the argument.
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Refuting a weakened misstatement of the opponent's claim.
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Introducing an irrelevance that changes the subject.
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Dismissing a claim because the speaker is inconsistent with it.
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Answering a charge by raising an unrelated charge.
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Judging a claim by its origin rather than its merits.
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Pre-discrediting a source before it speaks.
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Substituting feeling for evidence.
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Citing an authority outside their domain of expertise.
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Treating popularity as evidence of truth.
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Treating "natural" as equivalent to good or safe.
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Treating longevity of a practice as its justification.
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Treating newness as evidence of superiority.
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Rejecting a claim because its truth would be unwelcome.
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Presenting two options when more exist.
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Asserting an unsupported chain from a modest step to a disaster.
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Assuming the truth must lie between two positions.
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Using the conclusion as one of its own premises.
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A question whose presupposition is the disputed claim.
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Shifting a term's meaning mid-argument.
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Treating two unlike things as comparable in the relevant respect.
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Transferring a conclusion across a disanalogy that matters.
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Redefining a category to exclude the counterexample.
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Exempting a favored case from a rule without principled reason.
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Raising the evidential bar once it has been met.
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Defending a modest claim while advancing a bold one.
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Overwhelming with volume of claims rather than quality.
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Relentless bad-faith requests for evidence framed as civility.
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Inferring causation from mere sequence.
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Reducing a multi-causal outcome to one factor.
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Generalizing from a sample too small or biased.
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Preferring a vivid story to systematic data.
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Presenting the worst examples as representative of a group.
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Inferring the whole has a property because its parts do.
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Inferring a part has a property because the whole does.
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Drawing the target around the cluster after the fact.
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Rejecting an improvement because it is not a perfect solution.
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Denying a distinction because the boundary is vague.
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Deriving a moral conclusion from purely factual premises.
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Inferring what IS from what OUGHT to be.
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Believing a claim because it would be pleasant if true.
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Justifying an act by pointing to a comparable wrong.
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Treating one's own failure to imagine as evidence.
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Treating absence of disproof as proof.
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Demanding the skeptic disprove an unsupported claim.
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Inferring correctness from being ridiculed.
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A claim true by definition and therefore empty of content.
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Concluding a claim is false because its argument was flawed.
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Judging an argument by delivery rather than content.
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Dismissing a claim by imputing an interest to the speaker.
B. Cognitive biases
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Seeking and weighting evidence that fits the held belief.
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An arbitrary first number drags later estimates toward it.
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Judging frequency by how easily an example comes to mind.
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Judging probability by resemblance to a stereotype.
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Remembering a past judgement as more confident than it was.
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Grading a decision by how it turned out, not by what was knowable.
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Low competence removes the ability to see the incompetence.
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Confidence intervals that are systematically too narrow.
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Systematically underestimating one's own risk of bad outcomes.
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One salient trait colors judgement of unrelated traits.
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Explaining others by character, oneself by circumstance.
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Claiming credit for success and blaming circumstance for failure.
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Assuming outcomes are deserved because the world is fair.
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Overestimating how much others notice you.
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Overestimating how visible your inner state is.
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Being unable to model what a novice does not know.
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Assuming your view is more widely shared than it is.
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Negative information weighs more than equivalent positive.
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Logically identical descriptions produce different choices.
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First and last items are recalled better than middle ones.
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Seeing pattern in genuinely random streaks.
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Expecting a run to continue in an independent process.
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Expecting a run to correct in an independent process.
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Ignoring prevalence when reading a diagnostic signal.
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Studying only the cases that made it into view.
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Preferring the current state as the reference point.
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Losses loom roughly twice as large as equivalent gains.
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Owning a thing raises the price you demand to release it.
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Effort invested in building raises subjective value.
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Unrecoverable past spending driving a forward-looking choice.
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Predicting one's own project by the best case, not the base rate.
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Steeply discounting future value relative to immediate.
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Willingness to pay barely moves with the size of the good.
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Vivid features dominate attention regardless of diagnosticity.
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Ease of processing is misread as truth or familiarity.
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Accepting vague universal descriptions as personally accurate.
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Judgement shifted by whatever was presented immediately before.
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Retracted information keeps shaping inference.
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A belief survives the removal of its original evidence.
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Discomfort from inconsistency resolved by belief change.
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Detecting bias in others while feeling exempt oneself.
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The desired conclusion selects the standard of proof.
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Retroactively justifying a costly commitment.
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Fast intuitive judgement vs slow effortful checking.
C. Evidence, statistics, and scientific reasoning
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Co-movement alone fixes no causal direction.
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A third variable driving both measured quantities.
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The proposed effect is in fact the cause.
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Coincidental co-movement in large search spaces.
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The comparison arm that makes an effect attributable.
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Response to the act of treatment rather than the treatment.
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Neither subject nor assessor knows the assignment.
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Randomization removes selection; observation cannot.
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Exogenous variation standing in for randomization.
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Random assignment balances unknown confounders in expectation.
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Small samples produce extreme sample statistics more often.
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Who is in the frame determines what generalizes.
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The way units entered the sample is related to the outcome.
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Those who decline differ systematically from those who answer.
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Extreme measurements are followed by less extreme ones.
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Which centre summarizes honestly depends on the skew.
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Two distributions with equal means can differ in every decision-relevant way.
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A doubled risk of a rare event is still rare.
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Prevalence must enter before a test result can be read.
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P(A given B) is not P(B given A).
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Reading a match probability as a probability of innocence.
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A trend in every subgroup can reverse when pooled.
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Inferring individual behavior from group-level averages.
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A detectable effect can be too small to matter.
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Flexible analysis until something crosses a threshold.
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Enough tests guarantee some pass by chance.
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The range of effects the data do not rule out.
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A claim that forbids no observation explains nothing.
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An unreplicated result is a hypothesis, not a finding.
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Null results are less likely to be published or seen.
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Prefer the explanation adding fewest unsupported entities.
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A measure that becomes a target ceases to measure.
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A cropped baseline exaggerates a small difference.
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Area, dual axes and cherry-picked windows distort magnitude.
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Reported digits exceeding what the method can resolve.
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Prior improbability raises the evidence a claim must clear.
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What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
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Prefer incompetence to malice as an explanation.
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Absence is evidence of absence only where you would have seen it.
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A graded relation between exposure and effect supports causation.
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A cause must precede its effect; check the timeline.
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A plausible pathway raises but does not establish causation.
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Who measures the outcome can move the outcome.
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Magnitude, not significance, is what a decision consumes.
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Fixing hypotheses before data removes analytic freedom.
D. Argument structure and logic
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Which claim is doing the supporting and which is supported.
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The unstated premise the argument silently needs.
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Validity is form; soundness adds true premises.
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A valid argument with a false premise can reach a false conclusion.
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Conclusion guaranteed by the premises if valid.
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Conclusion supported but not guaranteed by the premises.
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Inference to the best available explanation.
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Without it the claim cannot hold; it need not suffice.
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With it the claim holds; it need not be required.
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One case refutes a universal claim.
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"All" and "some" have different refutation conditions.
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Transitivity across categories, and where it fails.
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If P then Q; P; therefore Q.
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If P then Q; not Q; therefore not P.
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If P then Q; Q; therefore P — invalid.
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If P then Q; not P; therefore not Q — invalid.
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"If P then Q" is equivalent to "if not Q then not P".
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Neither follows from the original conditional.
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Either P or Q; not P; therefore Q.
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A conjunction is never more probable than either conjunct.
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Where a quantifier or negation attaches changes the claim.
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Engaging the strongest version of the opposing argument.
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Reading an ambiguous claim in its most defensible sense.
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One establishes a disputed claim; the other accounts for an accepted one.
E. Decision-making and rationality
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Probability-weighted average of outcomes.
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A positive-expectation bet can still be unsurvivable.
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The value of the best option you did not take.
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Asking what happens after what happens next.
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Assume the plan failed, then explain why, before committing.
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Assigning the counter-case so it gets an honest hearing.
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Revising a prior in proportion to the evidence's diagnosticity.
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Holding degrees of confidence rather than binary belief.
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Reversible decisions deserve speed; irreversible ones deserve deliberation.
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Binding yourself in advance against a predicted lapse.
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Recording reasoning at the time to defeat hindsight.
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Using the base rate of similar cases over inside detail.
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Reducing variance without proportionally reducing expectation.
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Good-enough with a stopping rule vs searching for the optimum.
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Deliberation cost exceeding the value of the improvement.
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Choosing by the anticipated regret of the long view.
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Tiny probabilities of vast payoffs breaking naive expected value.
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Aggregation helps only when errors are independent.
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Heuristics trade accuracy for speed; know which you are buying.
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Optimize for the tails when downside and upside differ in kind.
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A good decision can have a bad outcome and remain good.
F. Media and source literacy
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Leave the page and check what others say about the source.
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A report about a study is not the study.
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Who funded it, and what would they have preferred to find.
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Peer review screens for competence, not for truth.
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Equal airtime misrepresenting an unequal evidence base.
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A faithful quotation can carry an unfaithful meaning.
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Trace a viral claim to its first appearance before judging it.
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What makes a witness credible: access, competence, incentive.
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Three outlets repeating one wire story are one source.
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Independent confirmation multiplies evidential weight.
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Reading beyond your competence needs expert triangulation.
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A once-true finding superseded by later work.
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Headlines are written to be clicked, not to be accurate.
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Expertise is domain-bounded and does not transfer.
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What an unnamed source can and cannot support.
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Selective edits, staged context, and synthetic imagery.
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