Under Pressure

I recently learned that everyone on earth is under a ton of pressure, pushing down on me, pressing down on you, no man asked for. This is all air pressure that is constantly exerted on us. I was pretty surprised to learn this at first - Because it doesn't feel like there's any pressure on me. Then I realized this was an appeal to common belief. In chapter 5, page 97, The Critical Thinking book states a bad appeal to common belief as "It's usually a mistake to accept a claim as true solely because a lot of other people believe it." This is a common mistake that people make, maybe because they didn't pay attention in science class or didn't take a science class. Anyways, I was just making up some reason to start reciting Queen, but I ended up relating to the book anyways, so it looks like my job here is done.

My Sweet Old Etcetera

This isn't so much as what I learned as a critique of this online class. I guess I have learned a lot from the class, but one thing that always bugged me throughout the semester was writing up these discussion posts - I can understand why they're mandatory and why participation is essential to the class, but the problem is even though we're forced to participate, there's no incentive to put any effort into our work. Or at least not for me. All I try to do is meet the minimum word requirement and the minimum amount of posts every week. I don't try to write something insightful or show that I learned something useful from the book, since I know I would get the same amount of points just typing out a rambling stream of consciousness post that only happens to be tangentially related. And I've reached my quota.

Smart Chinese People

So I was flipping through the book when I noticed this quote:
"I've got a couple of Chinese students in my classes. They're both hard-working and get good grades. I suppose all Chinese are like that." (pg 287)

The book describes this quote as a hasty generalization using anecdotal evidence. It basically explains why we have to take in consideration the sample size when make statements like this. Generally, the bigger the sample size, the more accurate the generalization will be. apparently, "1,500 is typically adequate for the sample size when surveying all adults in the U.S." (pg 288) Now this just might be me, but 1,500 people sounds way too small of a sample to represent the entire U.S. population. With such a small number, you could easily distort the sample. For example, let's pretend I'm doing a survey of the average American's political views. My sample size is 1,500 people and I decide I'm going to ask 1,500 people in San Francisco about their political views. So I take this data and say, "This is the political view of an average American." Of course, since my sample size is only San Franciscans, I am most likely going to get a political view heavily skewing towards liberal. I forgot what else I had to say but basically the point is 1,500 is way too small a number to represent America as a whole but if you're going to use it, you're going to have to make sure your sample is diverse so you don't end up skewing towards a specific result.

Tracing the Cause Backwards

I really liked the section in the book about tracing the cause backwards. The book goes through a convoluted set of events to trace the cause of Dick waking up, but after it goes through everything, it says "but really... This is silly. We could go backwards forever. We stop at the first step: Spot's barking caused Dick to wake up. We stop because as we trace the cause back further it becomes too hard to fill in the normal conditions." So basically, it's too hard to figure what started this chain of events, so we just go with the one most directly connected to Dick waking up. Dick woke up because Spot barked. I thought this was great because when I read it, I phrased it in my mind as "You know what? screw it. Let's just blame Spot." So it turns out after all this time that I wasn't doing this because I was lazy, it turns out that it's okay to do this because it's just too hard.

Overload

I know I was supposed to write what was useful about the mission critical website, but I first wanted to mention how overloaded with links it is. I saw it and I was just overwhelmed about what to do. They should find some way to streamline the interface or something because I just wasn't even sure what to click on at that point just because of the amount of things to click on. I realize that much of it is also review, as it covers old ground like appeals to fear and pity etc. Also things like straw men and others.

Edit: It turns out that my word count for this post was a bit short. So I'm going to post this little gem I found in the Instruction to Ad Hominem section of Mission Critical.

"Of course she's in favor of affirmative action. What do you expect from a black woman?"

I also just realized that I never post and images or media or anything - so here's one:

Potato Salad

I worked through the cause and effect exercise and what I think worked in the exercise was how the exercise had a clear sense of progression on causal reasoning. It starts with figuring out the people getting sick and the most important common link between them getting sick. The second question strengthens the case for them getting sick from eating potato salad because no one else ate the potato salad in question. Since only people who ate potato salad because sick, it makes a stronger case that the potato salad was the what caused them to become sick. The last question confused me though. I understood the question so far as people becoming sick right after they ate the potato salad, but I didn't really "get" what it meant when it said the incubation period was only 3 days. First, I didn't really get what the statement meant. Second, I didn't really get what it had to do with anything.

Appeal to Spite

I think I've already mentioned this earlier, but I want to talk about appealing to spite again. Out of all of the appeals to emotion, I think the appeal to spite is my favorite, because you're appealing to someone's sense of revenge. In an appeal to spite, you're convincing someone to either do something they wouldn't normally do or to not do something they would normally do just to get back at someone. I really like this appeal because it's really catering to most base feelings people have. It takes the most rational of decisions and twists the outcome due to pettiness. Here's an example:

A small farming community bands together to chase wild animals away from their crop/animals. However, one day...

Villager A: Hey B, could I borrow your wife for a minute? My wife's giving birth right now and I don't know what to do.
Villager B: Sorry, but she's also giving birth right now.

Later on

Villager B: Hey, A help! my flock is being attacked by ravenous wolves!

Villager A: I'm -

Villager A's internal monologue: Wait a second, why should I help him? he didn't help me in my time of need.

Villager A: -Sorry, but I'm giving birth right now.