Critical Thinking and Decision Making
Reason clearly, spot bad arguments and make defensible decisions.
Taught by Saroj · Founder, My Skill Lab
What you'll learn
- Break any argument into its claim, premises and hidden assumptions and judge whether it holds
- Recognise the logical fallacies that turn up most often in meetings, media and marketing
- Identify cognitive biases in your own thinking and apply a specific countermeasure for each
- Evaluate evidence by source quality, sample size, base rates and the difference between correlation and causation
- Make and document decisions with weighted scoring, expected value, pre-mortems and a decision journal
- Verify claims produced by AI tools with a repeatable checking routine before acting on them
About this course
Critical thinking is the skill employers now rank alongside technical ability, because the hard part of most jobs is no longer finding information but judging it. This free course is for students, early-career professionals and managers who want to reason more clearly, argue more persuasively and make decisions they can defend later. You will learn to break an argument into claims and premises, recognise the logical fallacies and cognitive biases that distort everyday reasoning, weigh evidence with base rates and sample sizes in mind, and use practical decision-making frameworks such as weighted scoring, expected value and the pre-mortem. A dedicated lesson shows how to validate AI output from tools like ChatGPT and Claude instead of trusting it blindly. There are no prerequisites and no maths beyond simple arithmetic. Every lesson includes short exercises drawn from work, news and daily life so the habits stick.
Course content
7 lessons- 1Why Clear Thinking Is a Skill, Not a TraitFast and slow thinking, what critical thinking actually means, and a five-question checklist you can use today.Preview
- 2The Anatomy of an ArgumentClaims, premises, conclusions and hidden assumptions, and how to put any argument into standard form.
- 3Logical Fallacies You Meet Every WeekThe most common bad-argument patterns, how to recognise each, and how to respond without being a pedant.
- 4Cognitive Biases and How to Counter ThemConfirmation, anchoring, availability, survivorship and overconfidence, each paired with a practical debiasing move.
- 5Weighing EvidenceSource quality, sample size, base rates, and why correlation is not causation, with a simple way to update your beliefs.
- 6Decision Frameworks That Actually Get UsedWeighted scoring, expected value, pre-mortems, reversibility and a decision journal for learning from outcomes.
- 7Validating AI OutputWhy language models sound confident when wrong, and a checking routine for anything an AI tells you.