Attend or Die

Group presentations begin on Friday. I mentioned this in class, but just in case...

Attendance is mandatory for the group presentations on Friday (5/2/07), Monday (5/5/07), and Wednesday (5/7/07). It's the only time I'll be a stickler for it. Basically, I want you to show respect for the other groups presenting.

If you don't attend on either the days your group isn't presenting (and your absence isn't excused), your own personal presentation grade will drop. Each day you don't attend will lower your grade by a full letter grade.

One last thing: be sure to keep the presentations under 15 minutes. A 10-minute presentation is ideal, so we can have time for a short question-and-answer session afterwards.

Pre-Writing, Post-Writing, Writing-Writing

Today's dinosaur comic is a combo of our last two topics: writing and advertising!

(Click on the comic to enlarge)


Oh, so you want some non-web-comic content? Fine.

Here are some tips on writing philosophy papers. The first one's a great basic guideline, and the second one's a little more advanced.

BS

Here's the video of Jon Stewart interviewing Harry Frankfurt about his book On Bullshit.


What do you think? Is not caring about whether you're telling the truth worse than deliberately lying?

I'm The Special-est

First, here's a link to the article we discussed in class about how The Secret is really wishful thinking run amok.

OK, now that we're discussing psychological impediments, we're going to dive into one of my favorite topics: I'M-SPECIAL-ism. Psychological research has repeatedly shown that most Americans overestimate their own abilities. This is one of the biggest hurdles to proper reasoning: the natural tendency to think that we're smarter--or more powerful, or prettier, or whatever--than we really are.

One of my favorite blogs is Overcoming Bias. Their mission statement is sublimely anti-I'M-SPECIAL-ist:

"How can we better believe what is true? While it is of course useful to seek and study relevant information, our minds are full of natural tendencies to bias our beliefs via overconfidence, wishful thinking, and so on. Worse, our minds seem to have a natural tendency to convince us that we are aware of and have adequately corrected for such biases, when we have done no such thing."

This may sound insulting, but one of the goals of this class is getting us to recognize that we're not as smart as we think we are. All of us. You. Me. That guy. You again.

So in the upcoming weeks, at least, I hope you'll join me in my campaign to end I'M-SPECIAL-ism.

Pimply Stress

This mini-article on acne and anxiety raises a combo platter of questions relevant to what we're going over in class.

1) Reverse causation: Does acne cause stress, or does stress cause acne?
2) Questionable statistics: Do you trust the stat that students were 23 percent more likely to experience breakouts around the time of a test? Is it a good study? A reliable source? An undemanding stat?
3) Questionable use of statistics: If the above statistic is true, is it reasonable to conclude that anxiety causes acne? Or is there another plausible explanation?

What say you?

That's An Ad Hominem, You Jerk

Here's a cartoon on the ad hominem fallacy and hypocrisy.

(Click on the comic to enlarge)

Get to studying, you ignorant sluts.

Homework #2

Homework #2 is due at the beginning of class on Monday, March 10th. The assignment is to answer Problems 1-15 (except DON'T do #9 or #12) in Exercise 4-1 on pages 86-88 of our textbook.

Also, the due date for paper #1 has been pushed back to Wednesday, March 12th. The midterm will still be on Friday, March 14th. We'll be reviewing for the midterm in class on Wednesday.

(If you read this, write "Why is anything anything?" at the bottom of your homework to receive some extra points on the assignment.)

Fallacies, Fallacies, Everywhere

My best friend the inter-net has some nice examples of the fallacy of equivocation. Here are two good ones:

All jackasses have long ears.

Karl is a jackass.

Therefore, Karl has long ears.

Margarine is better than nothing.

Nothing is better than butter.

Therefore margarine is better than butter.

Also, speaking of non sequiturs, here's a cute cat picture:

Wait, we weren't just speaking of non sequit--Oh. I see what you did there.

Clever.

Begging the Dinosaur

Here is a comic and a video about the fallacy of begging the question. The first is one of Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics on the fallacy. (Click on the comic to enlarge it)

And here's the video for Mims's logically delicious song "This is Why I'm Hot":

Snow Day!

Our class is cancelled today, Friday, February 22nd, because of the snow. In fact, all classes at Camden County College are cancelled today.

Enjoy!