Critical Thinking¶
The habit of not believing your own conclusions until they survive scrutiny — separating claim from evidence, naming the fallacy, catching the bias, and weighing tradeoffs on their merits rather than your gut.
This section is about disciplined skepticism applied to engineering decisions. It moves from the structure of a sound argument (claim, evidence, reasoning) through the fallacies and cognitive biases that quietly corrupt technical judgment, and ends with a method for evaluating tradeoffs objectively instead of by who argued loudest.
Topics¶
| # | Topic | What you'll learn |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Claims, Evidence, and Reasoning | Distinguishing assertion from proof, burden of proof, anecdote vs data, the Toulmin model of an argument |
| 02 | Logical Fallacies in Engineering | Appeal to authority, false dichotomy, hasty generalization, "it works on my machine", correlation vs causation |
| 03 | Cognitive Biases in Code Decisions | Confirmation bias, anchoring, sunk-cost fallacy, recency bias, the curse of knowledge in design reviews |
| 04 | Evaluating Tradeoffs Objectively | Decision matrices, weighted criteria, making assumptions explicit, separating reversible from irreversible calls |
How to use this section¶
Each topic has five depth levels — junior → middle → senior → professional — plus an interview Q&A bank and hands-on tasks. Start at your level and climb. Read 01 first for the vocabulary of argument, then use 02–04 as a checklist you run against your own reasoning in reviews and design docs.
Part of the Engineering Thinking roadmap. Sharpen the same edge against unfamiliar problems with First-Principles Thinking.