How to outsmart bad arguments - Fallacies ABC

What is the course about?

Fallacies are bad arguments, but they seem good and can mislead us into making bad decisions. Fallacies can be employed at work, by colleagues, clients, business partners, bosses. We can also face fallacies outside the job, from virtually everybody: TV ads, politicians, even our own spouses. We can also deceive ourselves.

Course content

What will you learn?

In this course we will learn how to recognize and resist the most common 15 fallacies, from Loaded Question and Slippery Slope to Red Herring and Straw Man.

Each fallacy is illustrated with examples, funny dialogues, a case study discourse, and there's even a quiz show at the end to test your knowledge.

We describe the mechanism for each of these rational traps, and we learn proper ways to refute it.

Fallacies are like crime novels: if you know who the killer is, the whole plot seems transparent. In the same manner, this course acts like a vaccine: once we learn to recognize and counteract a fallacy, we cannot be deceived again. Enjoy!

What is the target audience?

This course is recommended for anybody who would like to improve their business communication skills.

Course instructors

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Radu Atanasiu

Lecturer, Maastricht School of Management Romania

Currently, Radu teaches the pro-course Critical Thinking for Business on iversity. His previous MOOC on Critical Thinking, hosted on the same platform, reached (in 2014 - 2015) tens of thousands of students from all over the world.
Radu Atanasiu teaches Critical Thinking for the Executive MBA program at the Maastricht School of Management Romania and for the undergraduate program at the Entrepreneurship Academy in Bucharest, and pursues his PhD at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam on the topic of managerial heuristics in organizational decision-making.
Aside from teaching and learning, Radu conducts Critical Thinking, Decision-Making, and Complex Problem Solving workshops for companies, and is actively involved as angel investor in several promising start-ups.
Radu founded DeBunavoie.ro, a non-profit volunteering matching platform, and runs marathons dressed as Mickey Mouse.