8 Logical Fallacies That Mess Us All Up

I’m going to be honest: most courses you take in university aren’t worth a whole lot. That’s not because the professors are bad or the coursework is pointless (although sometimes that is definitely the case). I mean that most of the courses you take will never be all that relevant to the rest of your life.

But then, every once in a while, often by accident, you stumble into a course that is hugely impactful on your life. That happened to me in my sophomore year. I needed to take an elective from the humanities department, and not wanting to get sucked into a seminar on “Romantic literature of the 1840s” or whatever, I went for the least humanities-sounding thing I could find on the list: a philosophy course called “Logic and Reasoning.” It probably ended up being the most valuable course I ever took in my life.

From day one, I loved my logic course. Each morning, we’d all come into class to find a question like this on the board:

“Every time a train arrives at the station, there are many passengers on the platform. You arrive at the station and see many passengers waiting on the platform. Is it necessarily true that a train will arrive soon?”

Pretty much everyone in the class would answer “yes” and then become infuriated when the professor told us the correct answer was no-just because trains always…