“This short book makes you smarter than 99% of the population. . . . The concepts within it will increase your company’s ‘organizational intelligence.’. . . It’s more than just a must-read, it’s a ‘have-to-read-or-you’re-fired’ book.”—Geoffrey James, INC.com
From the author of
An Illustrated Book of Loaded Language,
here’s the antidote to fuzzy thinking, with furry animals!
Have you read (or stumbled into) one too many irrational online debates? Ali Almossawi certainly had, so he wrote
An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments
! This handy guide is here to bring the internet age a much-needed dose of old-school logic (really old-school,
a la
Aristotle).
Here are cogent explanations of the
straw man
fallacy, the
slippery slope
argument, the
ad hominem
attack, and other common attempts at reasoning that actually fall short—plus a beautifully drawn menagerie of animals who (adorably) commit every logical
faux pas
. Rabbit thinks a strange light in the sky
must
be a UFO because no one can prove otherwise (
the appeal to ignorance
). And Lion doesn’t believe that gas emissions harm the planet because, if that
were
true, he wouldn’t like the result (the
argument from consequences
).
Once you learn to recognize these abuses of reason, they start to crop up everywhere from congressional debate to YouTube comments—which makes this geek-chic book a
for anyone in the habit of holding opinions.