I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many pissed off twenty-year-olds as I did in that classroom each week. 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 arrive when there are many passengers does not mean that many passengers will always result in a train arriving. Is it necessarily true that a train will arrive soon?” You arrive at the station and see many passengers waiting on the platform. “Every time a train arrives at the station, there are many passengers on the platform. Each morning, we’d all come into class to find a question like this on the board: 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.įrom day one, I loved my logic course. That happened to me in my sophomore year. I mean that most of the courses you take will never be all that relevant to the rest of your life.īut then, every once in a while, often by accident, you stumble into a course that is hugely impactful on your life. That’s not because the professors are bad or the coursework is pointless (although sometimes that is definitely the case). I’m going to be honest: most courses you take in university aren’t worth a whole lot.

Def of a red herring logical fallacy