Good Reasoning for Life; An Interactive Program for Teenagers

The second semester is focused on how to reason well: how we can minimize errors in judgment, and how to recognize poor or fallacious arguments all around us. We'll utilize a variety of sources including reasoning in current affairs (television news, newspapers), the web, our own life experiences, interactions with others, advertising and other sources.

We'll develop solid principles around these examples. As usual the class will be highly interactive and will involve dialogs and debates. This semester's class promises to be highly entertaining while eye opening and very educational–you'll be surprised how many very smart people can go terribly wrong, and how you can see it before they do. You'll find it surprising how billions of dollars (and many lives) are regularly wasted on poorly conceived notions, deceptive statements and baseless conclusions. And you'll find it entertaining how often we hold onto superstitions, see patterns where there are none, and are convinced by faulty arguments.

Dr. Ali S. Kazeroonian has studied critical thinking, decision making, and reasoning for the past 10 years. In Active Decisions, a company he founded in 1998, he applied some of these reasoning principles to consumer shopping. Dr. Kazeroonian received his bachelor’s degree from Caltech and Ph.D. from MIT, both in Physics.