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.

Exercise Number 3

I found an advertisement from the most recent presidential campaign - an ad sponsored by John Mccain.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVLQhRiEXZs&feature=player_embedded

This is an appeal to fear. The advertisement says that Obama's only (educational) accomplishment is passing legislation that would teach comprehensive sex education to kindergartners. The ad then goes on to ask: "Learning about sex before learning to read?"

This advertisement of course, makes two wrong assumptions.

1) Children do not learn to read until they enter kindergarten.
2) Being taught about sex before some arbitrary time period (In this case, before learning to read or in kindergarten) is bad in some unexplained way.

I could be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure most kids know how to read by the time they've reached kindergarten.
Second, what's the problem with being taught about sex at a young age? Teaching kids no sexual education at a young age doesn't stop them from romping through cupid's groves as adolescents, so we know that teaching nothing doesn't prevent them from having sex. What's wrong with taking a different approach? (Assuming the accusation is even true, because the wording of sex education is so vague that for all we know the "sex education" could be about flowers being cross pollinated by bees or something)

So to break it down, the advertisement is an appeal to fear because it's essentially threatening parents by saying Obama will teach their kids about the birds and the bees as they learn their ABC's.

Appeal to Emotions

Appeals to emotion are becoming less commonplace on TV, I think. I think it's time to change that. I think television viewers are at this point saavy enough to recognize an appeal to emotion when they see them on tv, in a commercial or something. That knowledge should be used to make more appeals to emotion, except now they can be guised under the cover of being "ironic". For example, this fake commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUXAgUoPa3U

It's an appeal to fear that is so over the top that you as the audience cannot help but laugh at how absurd it is. Seriously. What happened to the appeal to emotion? No more menacing images of criminals behind bars or anything. Commercial makers need to bring back appeals to emotions.
Also, I think an overlooked appeal to emotion is the appeal to spite. It's my favorite appeal to emotion because it isn't appealing to something like what you're afraid of or what tugs at your heartstrings like the appeal to fear and pity respectively, but it appeals to people who do things or don't do things specifically because of what other people did or did not do for them. Now that's classy.

Vague generalities

I like vague generalities, precisely because they're vague. When using vague generalities, it's a lot harder for someone to correct you, unlike precise generalities. For example:

Precise generality: 99 percent of college students drink at some point in college.
Vague generality: A lot of college students drink at some point in college.

Because I've provided a precise amount of college students that drink, someone could look up the statistics and point out that my information is plain wrong. But if they look at my vague generality and check the statistics, how do they compare the two? even if the percentage is low (Which it isn't) it will still be a large number of people because the college student demographic is so high. So it could still qualify as "a lot" of students. Throwing around vague generalities gives me a lot of lee way to be proven right. On the other hand, if I'm speaking in precise generalities, my claim is much more likely to be disputed because it's much more specific information. My avenues of being correct are much smaller than if I were to be speaking in vague, sweeping generalizations.

Considering the Social Organization

I think writing critically about a specific social organization was a very useful exercise. It helped me actually be critical about specific organizations instead of simply assuming what they do. For example, because I had to go out of my way to critically examine things I would normally not think twice about - advertisements, claims, beliefs of the organization, etc. I could see what kind of fallacies they employed in their writing and what appeals they would use to get people to pay attention, and how they used celebrity endorsements as well. So overall, I thought the assignment was very useful, because I learned to look more critically when any organization makes a vague claim or when they employ some sort of fallacy in their reasoning, or even try to use an appeal to emotion in order to get money from people (in the case of something like a charity, anyway)

General Claims

Everyone uses general claims. In fact, I just used one. I think people use general claims way too much. They're about as command as people using the word "like" or "uh" after every couple of words. Of course, the problem I have with people using general claims to much is that when they use them they tend to be making things up. For example, they say something like, "You don't like ice cream? but everyone loves ice cream!" the general claim they use is obviously a lie because it is contradicted by the previous statement. The idea of general claims actually reminds of made up statistics, except two things:

1) No specific percentages, only estimates like "some", "most", "at least x".

2) Most people (general claim!) tend to call you out less on general claims than on statistics, mainly because the general claims are so vague that it sounds like common knowledge from the way they're told.

I don't know why, but I have the irresistible urge to type this quote:
"Sixty percent of the time, it works every time"

Internet advertising

While it's unlikely that you'll see one of these ads at this point, when I think of internet advertising I think of a video game called Evony. Here's a link to the history of Evony's advertising:

If you notice the progression of the advertisements, the models have less and less clothes on. It almost seems like a parody. The ads start saying things like, "Play discreetly in your browser." The funniest thing about this is that the game itself has little to do with the ads. From what I can remember reading about the game, it was a "sim" type game where you were some sort of overseer of an area and you would build some sort of city with an army or something. While I have no evidence besides the ads, I would wager that, considering the ads have nothing to do with the game, the ads were solely to get people to click on them. While this claim seems to be pretty plausible, the shocking thing is that the ads seemed to have worked. Why else would the company make more of those ads?

Mistaking the person for the argument

A: My mom said children are brats and that's why I shouldn't have them.
B: Why are you listening to her advice? She doesn't even have any.

Besides the obvious problems with this argument, this argument is also another case of mistaking the person for the argument. Speaker B is implying that speaker A's mom doesn't know what she's talking about because she doesn't have any kids. Speaker B is also implying that Speaker A's mom could only come to the conclusion that kids are brats if she has her own kids. This type of fallacy is actually really common, I think. Many people mistake the person for the argument. Especially for people in high levels of administration and such. I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting these people to not be hypocritical, but I think the problem with this is that when one of these persons in administration end up doing something that is contradictory to what they are saying, they instantly lose all credibility and any of the arguments they made, whether they were valid or strong, are now deflected with, "Are you kidding? isn't this the same person that did that?"

Repairing Arguments

Here's an example of an argument that needs to be repaired:

This book costs five dollars. If I buy this book, I will have no money left.

While the argument implies that I have five dollars on hand, to make this argument strong I need to explicitly say that I have five dollars. If I add that to the argument, then my argument becomes strong. I have five dollars on hand, so if I buy the book, which costs five dollars, I will have no money left. Even though it seems like a given argument that I have five dollars, It's important to add that I have five dollars on hand because it could turn out that the premise was all wrong and I only had four dollars and fifty cents on hand or something, and I just happen to be bad at math. It's best not to assume someone's implications are correct when you can have them explicitly tell you and verify for yourself whether the premises are correct or not.

Structural Fallacies

Structural fallacies are great. You know that when someone's argument is structurally false, their argument is wrong, despite the content of their argument. The way they argued their point makes them automatically wrong. Most of these types of fallacies are arguing backwards. An example of this type of structural fallacy would be this:

(All) fat people are jolly.

I'm jolly.

Therefore, I'm fat.

Assuming all fat people are jolly, (which isn't true), the fact that I'm also jolly does not necessarily mean that I'm fat. While I could be fat, being jolly does not make me fat. That is backwards reasoning. To put it more simply, the backwards argument goes like this:

All A is B.

C is B.

Because all A is B and C is also B, C is A.

So when someone's argument is structured in this way, you know that despite the content, the argument is very weak because its structure is unrepairable. So even if you agree with someone's content, you should still point out that their argument is weak because of their weak structure.

False Dilemmas

A false dilemma is a misleading argument that presents either this or that conclusion as the only possible conclusions in fact, other conclusions exist. The most popular example of this is the saying, "If you're not with us, then you're against us". This is a false dilemma because these two choices are clearly not the only two choices; just because you're not on the same side as someone does not mean you are against them. It's possible that you are a neutral third party, but because of the false dilemma it seems as if you would be against "them". The problem with the false dilemma is it allows no room for any other conclusions other than the ones presented when we know that other possible conclusions exist. If you changed the wording to something like, "What's your stance on etc?" It would leave room for someone to be with you, against you, or somewhere in between. The false dilemma is eliminated.

Exercise 1

I will be analyzing the structure of the following:
1. My neighbor should be forced to get rid of all the cars in his yard. 2. People do not like living next door to such a mess. 3. He never drives any of them. 4. They all look old and beat up and leak oil all over the place. 5. It is bad for the neighborhood, and it will decrease property values.

Argument? Yes.

Conclusion: Neighbor should be forced to get rid of all the cars in his yard.

Additional premises needed: Talked to neighbors, and they do not like living next door to such a mess. It is bad for the neighborhood and will decrease property values because people do not like living to such a mess.

Identify any subargument: 2,3,4, and 5 are independent and support the conclusion, 1.

Good Argument? Not really. In theory, the argument makes sense, but all of his supporting arguments are assumptions. For example: people do not like living to such a mess. That is a vague generalization. If the arguer had gone out of his/her way to ask the neighbors and mentioned that the neighbors didn't like living next to " a mess", then it would be a valid point. But as it is, they're simply assuming that "people don't like living to such a mess."

This exercise was mildly useful, I think. I had to dissect an argument and see where it was lacking, but I don't think it's actually all that useful unless these dissections are critiqued because otherwise I'm not actually learning where I could have strengthened the argument etc. This exercise only works if we get feedback on our work because otherwise we won't really know how well we dissected the argument, is essentially what I'm trying to say. The reason I think it's slightly useful though is because it does give a better understanding on how an argument works, though. Since I didn't make the argument, only dissecting it, I can objectively critique it because I don't have any vested interest in proving this argument correct or false. I'm a neutral third party and can simply see where the argument is strong or lacking. If I could carry this mentality over to my own arguments, I could learn to strengthen my own arguments.

The Three Tests to a Good Argument

According the the Critical Thinking textbook, an argument is good if it meets three criteria:

1) The premise must be plausible.

2) The premise must be more plausible than the conclusion.

3) The argument must be valid or strong.

Carl Sagan wrote about an invisible dragon in his garage. The invisible dragon can breathe heatless flames, and is incorporeal. Sagan writes, "what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists?" Essentially, what he is saying is that the argument is pointless if the premise cannot be proved.

Since the premise is the opposite of what one could consider plausible, the argument is rendered bad. The second rule, that the premise must be more plausible than the conclusion, also fails. The conclusion that dragons exist based on the idea that they cannot be detected in any way does not prove that they exist.

The third rule, that the argument must be valid or strong, does succeed. Let's look at the premise and the conclusion again.

Premise:

"There is an invisible dragon in my garage that cannot be detected by any physical means."

Conclusion:

"Dragons exist, they just can't be seen, felt, or heard in any way shape or form."

So, this argument would be valid, but a weak argument because it can't be proven since the invisible dragon is undetectable.

This argument is valid. Thus, it succeeds on the third rule.

Valid Versus Strong

A valid argument and a strong argument are two completely different things. A valid argument is only valid if, given that the premise is true, the conclusion cannot be false. If they do, it's no longer a valid argument. For example, here is a valid argument:

Premise:
The government wouldn't allow TV stations to broadcast false information on the airwaves.
Conclusion:
Everything I see on TV is true.

It's valid because under the circumstances that the government would not allow TV stations to broadcast lies on their stations, It would be impossible for anything I see on TV to be a lie.
An invalid argument would be something like

Premise:
So and so is single.
Conclusion:
So and so must be ugly.

This argument is invalid because given that so and so is ugly, the reason for so and so being single doesn't have to stem from their ugliness. They could have just broken up with someone, taken a break from their relationship, or they could actively choose to be single, turning down any suitors. Or they could be ugly. But the argument is invalid.

A strong argument is an argument that, given a true premise, the conclusion can be proven false, but the chance of the conclusion being false is small. For example:

Premise:
I and everyone I know have experienced a phenomenon known as rain.
Conclusion:
You, at some point in your future, will experience rain.

This is a strong argument because it is very likely to be true. The conclusion, that you, the reader will experience rain at some point in the future is very likely to happen. However, there is a possibility that you suddenly phase out of existence at this very moment and that I will be wrong about you experiencing rain in the future. But I will almost certainly be right.

"I've never seen so much snow in my life."

Vague statements are generally unhelpful and convey little to no information. For example, by reading the title statement, we can infer that the speaker hasn't seen x amount of snow ever, in his lifetime. That's it. We can't determine how much snow he's actually seeing, unless we happen to be there with him at the time. We don't know his scale for comparing amounts of snow. For example, he might be from a tropical area that never snows, so now that he's experienced a snowy day, it automatically becomes the largest amount of snow that he's ever seen, regardless of the amount of snow being (relatively) large or small. However, based on movies, when someone utters this statement, it tends to be during times when there is a snowstorm or such, so that it tends to be snowing heavily at the time. So when the author is saying that he's "never seen so much snow in" his "life", he's implying that it's snowing pretty heavily. But since there's nothing to back up this claim, we can't determine how much snow he's seeing at the time.

Objectivity Versus Subjectivity

I was trawling the 'nets today when I saw something online that I realized would be a perfect example of the difference between objectivity and subjectivity. It was a short current affairs bio page of a politician named Yulia Tymoshenko. The descriptor underneath her name went something along the lines of, "prime minister of Ukraine, world's hottest politician". Conventionally, I would say that the objective statement is "prime minister of Ukraine"
and the subjective would be "world's hottest politician", and this would be correct. She is the prime minister of Ukraine. It isn't a matter of what someone thinks about her. To say that she is the "world's hottest politician", on the other hand, is obviously subjective, because it is but one person's thoughts on her physical attractiveness. Someone could think that she really isn't the "world's hottest politician", because physical attractiveness is based on an individual's opinion. However, I would contest that what are facts, but a majority consensus about an idea? For instance, people once thought the Earth was flat. We now know that in fact, the Earth is not flat. But to these ancient people, the Earth being flat was an undisputed fact. Consequently, our own factual views of the Earth might change at some undetermined point in the future. What we view as facts are really nothing more than the general prevailing thought on a subject. This being said, If it were possible to show pictures of every current politician to every single person on the Earth and had them judge each politician's level of attractiveness, I am willing to bet a shekel or two that Yulia Tymoshenko would have the highest attractiveness ratings of any current politician, thus objectively earning her the title of "World's hottest politician". QED.

Introduction to Communications 41

Hello Class! My name is *Philippe! I am new to these "online classes", so please go easy on me! Okay, now let's get down to business.

Communication experience: I've accumulated years of communication experience with people in the form of physical speech, instant messaging, and through writing.

What I hope to get out of the class: I hope to learn the signs of critical thinking. I hope to learn enough about critical thinking that I will be able to catch people in the act when they try to think critically.

Experience with online classes: Reread opening line

Interests: I enjoy watching TV shows like MTV, reading books like Harry Potter, and some other stuff that I can't think of right now.

I guess that's it...?

*This is a lie. My name is not, in fact, Philippe.