How to Not Be Fooled (by Your Brain or Your Chatbot)
Decode any confident answer — from a person, a statistic, or an AI.
The hook
“Your brain wants a good story; data wants to ruin it — and so does your AI. The catch: AI was trained on us, so it inherits our exact blind spots.”
What students learn
- How predictable thinking bugs (anchoring, priming, the confidence trap) steer your judgement — and a chatbot's.
- The single most useful AI skill in the course: decoding an LLM's answer with the Ladder of Misinference.
- Why a hallucination is just a statement wearing the costume of proof.
- How to spot misleading graphs and statistics, whether a human or an AI made them.
- Why the same prompt can give different answers — and what to do about it.
The promise
By the end, students can take any confident answer — from a person, a statistic, or a chatbot — and climb the Ladder of Misinference to test it: statement → fact → data → evidence → proof.
Lands on
Certainty is not accuracy — not in your head, and not in a chatbot. Always ask which rung of the Ladder you are actually on.
The interactive AI demos
Every idea is a Mirror Move
We run it on the room, show it inside the machine, prove it on a live chatbot, then name the skill. Here are this session's loops.
The hour, beat by beat
- 1
Your brain has bugs
Anchoring and priming, run live on the room — then mirrored in the model.
- 2
Numbers and graphs lie
The gee-whiz axis, which-average tricks; AI generates and swallows the same ones.
- 3
Randomness fools us
Why one chatbot run is never the whole story.
- 4
Confident ≠ correct
An LLM's fluent confidence is not evidence.
- 5
Science self-corrects — and so should you
Climb the Ladder of Misinference on a chatbot's answer, together.
- 6
Empowering close
Rosling-style optimism: with these skills, AI is an extraordinary tool.
Drawn from
- Kahneman — Thinking, Fast and Slow
- Edmans — May Contain Lies (the Ladder of Misinference)
- Huff — How to Lie with Statistics
- Kahneman, Sibony & Sunstein — Noise
- Rosling — Factfulness
All sources are paraphrased; quotes are short and attributed. We teach the same skepticism toward AI that we teach toward any confident claim.
Next session
Thinking Like a Computer (So You Can Talk to One)
Direct the machineReady to book?
Run this session standalone, or as part of the four-session package.