After A Word From These Sponsors...

Here are some links on advertising and reasoning.

• The first is about the underlying intellectual dishonesty in even the most honest of ad campaigns.
  
• By the way, if you're into advertising, that entire blog is great. I'm a bit biased, though, since I used to work with the guy who writes it.
• Here's a radio interview with the director of FactCheck.org, a great website devoted to debunking claims in political ads.
• I also used to work with the guy who interviewed FactCheck's director. Yup, I'm a pretty big deal.
• I wish those fact checking websites made a difference. Actually, I just wish they didn't hurt their own cause. Silly humans and your naturally biased minds!
  

Now for some news stuff.

• Here's the dirty secret on how news is made.
  
• Lots of people worry about conservative or liberal news media bias. But there are several interesting biases that are much less talked about. Here's a discussion of the bias toward anything that's dangerous or newsworthy.
  
• Here's an interview with a scientist who claims that similar biases exist in scienctific research journals.
  
• What's so important about news, anyway? Here's an interesting argument against caring so much about current events.

Finally, here's a recent Saturday Night Live skit on the distortions of political ads:

Homework #3

Homework #3 is due at the beginning of class on Friday, May 1st. Your assignment is to choose an ad (on TV or from a magazine or wherever) and evaluate it from a logic & reasoning perspective.

• First, briefly explain the ad. If you don't want to summarize it yourself, you can attach it if it's from a newspaper or magazine, or transcribe it if it's a commercial on TV.
  
• Then, explain the argument that the ad offers to sell its product.
• Finally, list and explain the mistakes in reasoning that the ad commits.

Impeding Us Since Birth

So, I love research on psychological impediments. Here are some links:

• Here's an article about a cool study on the relationship between risk and provincialism.
• Here's a summary of two recent studies which suggest that partisan mindset stems from a feeling of moral superiority.
• Here is a bunch of insightful videos of Daniel Kahneman, one of the pioneers of research into psychological impediments.
• Here's a review of a well-written book on the natural ways we're all irrational.
  
• Wikipedia's great, complete list of cognitive biases is available here.
  

Finally, I know some of us are still pining for the WHY BAD? glory days of fallacies. Here's something for you:

• Julian Baggini runs through some really great fallacies, many of which we didn't discuss in class. He turned this series into a book: The Duck That Won the Lottery.
  

Team Wal-Mart

Here are some links on the ethics of Wal-Mart:

• Is Wal-Mart good for the working class? Here's a great debate between an economist who says yes and an activist who says no.
• How did Wal-Mart become the biggest retailer? Some point to Sam Walton's big idea that lowering prices would increase total sales and lead to higher profits. But another important development was how Wal-Mart streamlined its inventory process.
  
• Yes, Wal-Mart has low prices, and apparently the prices at other stores also go down in the long run when a Wal-Mart comes to town.
• Here's an animated map of the growth of Wal-Mart across America.
  
• Here are many of the common criticisms of Wal-Mart.
  
• Beware of false dilemmas! This isn't a zero-sum game: Wal-Mart doesn't have to raise its prices to raise its wages.
• Here's the full episode of South Park about a "Wall-Mart" coming to town. Below are some clips from the episode.

Team Blaze

Here are some links on marijuana:

• Here's a recent article celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the groundbreaking study on the medical value of marijuana.
• The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency's case against legalizing drugs.
• Another classic defense of keeping drugs illegal.
• A case for keeping pot specifically illegal.
• Legalize Pot? We Think Not!
• Criminalizing pot keeps cops from doing police work, and crowds prisons.
• The two faces of America's drug policy.
• What was the Supreme Court thinking?
  
• A radio show on drug legalization. And another on pot laws.
• Facts on weed, from an organization trying to stop the drug war.
• Slippery Slope? Pot doesn't lead to heroin!

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Better Know a Lobby - Drug Lobby
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

Team Veggies!

Here are some links and a video on animal ethics:

• Vegetarians Still Love the Smell of Bacon
• David Foster Wallace: Consider the Lobster
• How to Cut Back on Meat Slowly
• What Is The Meatrix?
  
• Animal Research (Peter Singer's Sometimes OK with It!)
• Peter Singer on Michael Vick & Dog Fighting
  
• Audio Interview with Peter Singer
• Michael Pollan's "An Animal's Place"
• Is Worrying About the Ethics of Your Diet Elitist?
• Huge List of Resources on the Moral Status of Animals

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Peter Singer

Ron Paul Interview
Bob Barr Interview

Green Screen
Bill O'Reilly Interview

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.

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":

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.

Maybe It'll Taste Good This Year...

Here's some random stuff related to inductive arguments. First, here's a video of Lewis Black describing his failure to reason inductively every year around Halloween:

Also, here's a stick figure comic about scientists' impulse to get a big enough sample.

Defining Our Terms

1. Tool: Here's one Urban Dictionary definition of "tool," the one I had in mind when referring to Dane Cook:

someone who tries too hard. a poser. one of those chic's who holds the sign saying "Carson Daly is Hot." the asstard who goes to a rock show because they heard one of the songs on the radio or mtv. or someone who insists on wearing velour sweat suits. Avril Lavigne.

To find out more, I suggest watching Tool Academy to see our heroes in action:

2. Fugly: uh, rather ugly. Moe Szyslak has been called a few variations of this term.

3. Emo Kid: "Emo" has a ton of meanings. The wikipedia article on "emo" has a nice history of the term.

4. Lame: South Park usually nails this term.

5. Carson Daly: This is especially for Steve, who kept asking for pictures of everyone's favorite TRL host.
Did I forget any terms? Let me know!