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 cause & effect: 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?

Fallacies, Fallacies, Everywhere

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

A feather is light.

What is light cannot be dark.
Therefore, a feather cannot be dark.

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.

That's an Ad Hominem, You Jerk

Here's a cartoon on the ad hominem fallacy and hypocrisy. (Click on the comics to enlarge them.)

Get to studying, you ignorant sluts.

Check the Source

-via GraphJam

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 a special video for Mims's logically delicious song "This is Why I'm Hot":

Let's Be Diplomatic: Straw Person

Here's a dinosaur comic on the straw man fallacy (click on the comic to enlarge it):

Penguin Digestion Experts? You Bet!

So you didn't believe me when I said that there are experts on the subject of penguin digestion? Oh, you did? Fine, well, I'll prove it to you, anyway. Here are some academic articles on the topic:

• Adjustments of gastric pH, motility and temperature during long-term preservation of stomach contents in free-ranging incubating king penguins from a 2004 issue of Journal of Experimental Biology
  
• Feeding Behavior of Free-Ranging King Penguins (Aptenodytes Patagonicus) from a 1994 issue of Ecology

Of course, no list would be complete without the often-cited, groundbreaking 1985 Ornis Scandinavica article:

• Differential Digestion of Fish and Squid in Jackass Penguins Spheniscus demersus

Perhaps my favorite, though, is the following:

• Pressures produced when penguins pooh—calculations on avian defaecation from a 2003 issue of Polar Biology
  

If any of these articles are above your head (I think they're all above mine!), you might like this, uh, simpler video demonstration of penguin digestion.

Consistent as a Contradiction

Here are two videos related to the fallacy of inconsistency:



Let's be charitable, though: is there any way to defend what these seemingly inconsistent people said?

An Expert for Every Cause

Looking for links on fallacies and appealing to authority? This is your post! First, there's a nice series of short articles on a bunch of different fallacies, including many that aren't in our book.

Next, here's an interesting article on a great question: How are non-specialists supposed to figure out the truth about stuff that requires expertise?

Not all alleged experts are actual experts. Here's a method to tell which experts are phonies.

Here's a Saturday Night Live sketch in which Christopher Walken completely flunks the competence test.

Finally, here's that article on the 9/11 conspiracy physicist that we talked about in class. I've quoted an excerpt of the relevant section on the lone-wolf semi-expert (physicist) versus the overwhelming consensus of more relevant experts (structural engineers):

While there are a handful of Web sites that seek to debunk the claims of Mr. Jones and others in the movement, most mainstream scientists, in fact, have not seen fit to engage them.

"There's nothing to debunk," says Zdenek P. Bazant, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University and the author of the first peer-reviewed paper on the World Trade Center collapses.

"It's a non-issue," says Sivaraj Shyam-Sunder, a lead investigator for the National Institute of Standards and Technology's study of the collapses.

Ross B. Corotis, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a member of the editorial board at the journal Structural Safety, says that most engineers are pretty settled on what happened at the World Trade Center. "There's not really disagreement as to what happened for 99 percent of the details," he says.

And one more excerpt on reasons to be skeptical of conspiracy theories in general:

One of the most common intuitive problems people have with conspiracy theories is that they require positing such complicated webs of secret actions. If the twin towers fell in a carefully orchestrated demolition shortly after being hit by planes, who set the charges? Who did the planning? And how could hundreds, if not thousands of people complicit in the murder of their own countrymen keep quiet? Usually, Occam's razor intervenes.

Another common problem with conspiracy theories is that they tend to impute cartoonish motives to "them" — the elites who operate in the shadows. The end result often feels like a heavily plotted movie whose characters do not ring true.

Then there are other cognitive Do Not Enter signs: When history ceases to resemble a train of conflicts and ambiguities and becomes instead a series of disinformation campaigns, you sense that a basic self-correcting mechanism of thought has been disabled. A bridge is out, and paranoia yawns below.