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"