A. Questions?
B. Are there any relevant distinctions between funding sources and policy in regards to public benefit?
C. Student work & recognition
D. Challenging your beliefs & arguments
Game
I. Cognitive Biases: Confirmation Bias, Negativity Bias, Availability Bias
A. Confirmation Bias: Only remembering/counting the hits and forgetting/ignoring the misses.
B. Negativity Bias: Tendency to over-emphasize negative results/events/data. We tend to remember negative events better than positive events. (Except in the elderly)
C. Availability Bias: Tendency to over-emphasize events/data that is recent.
D. Effects of Bias on Reasoning:
Chris Moony on Political Bias and Scientific Evidence
Political Bias and Numeracy
Effect of Bias on Reasoning
Backfire Effect
Bias in "Science" on social media (Chocolate study)
Effect of biases on perception
Can you spot the difference?
E. Examples
Trump on Global Warming
SIDS and Vaccines
Argument From Design/Teleological Argument
Influenza B Vaccine and Diabetes
II. Fallacy of Confirming Instances
Relevant Stats
More Examples
Green Sweater Story
The catastrophe survivor
Challenge: What are some examples of the fallacy of confirming instances (both sides) in the gun control debate? The Obamacare debate?
Atheists on Religion
Obamacare Anecdotes and Arguments
E.g. Gamblers on their own gambling; How the media reports gambling stories (focus on winners vs. losers).
III. Falsificationism
A. If X then Y will happen.
Y happened, therefore X is true. (true or false?)
X-->~Y
B. Explanatory vs Predictive Power
Mercury and Autism
C. Relationship to chance.
E. "A woman explained to other members of the audience that they don’t need a blood test to see if they’re affected. “There’s a simple test you can take with hydrogen peroxide and red wine in your mouth. And when you spit it out, you will see all those nanoparticles collect in the bowl. Every single one of you are affected. Every single one.”[1:33:45]"
V. Slanting by Omission
A. Omission
http://skepdic.com/fullmoon.html
Full Moon and Emergency Room Visits
Antarctica Is Gaining Ice
File Drawer Effect
Military spending cuts: Almost 500 billion over 10 years!
British Empire
Context
Context w/Allies
B. Comparisons
1. Averages and Distribution
Average (Mean) Household Income 69, 000 vs Median 50, 000
2. Apples to Oranges
Movie ticket in 1960 vs Now
male-female wage gap
3. Several types of misleading comparisons:
Female hurricane names and "deadliness"
4. Difficult cases:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/nov/20/why-innocent-people-plead-guilty/
How prevalent is the phenomenon of innocent people pleading guilty? The few criminologists who have thus far investigated the phenomenon estimate that the overall rate for convicted felons as a whole is between 2 percent and 8 percent. The size of that range suggests the imperfection of the data; but let us suppose that it is even lower, say, no more than 1 percent. When you recall that, of the 2.2 million Americans in prison, over 2 million are there because of plea bargains, we are then talking about an estimated 20,000 persons, or more, who are in prison for crimes to which they pleaded guilty but did not in fact commit.
Misleading Comparisons Using Graphs
https://www.boundless.com/statistics/frequency-distributions/frequency-distributions-for-qualitative-data/misleading-graphs/
comparison of drugs in terms of harms
Actual study
Homework 3A
Meme: Go to http://memegenerator.net/
A) 1. Pick an Issue: 2. Design a meme for each side of the issue that commits the fallacy of confirming instances to deliberately mislead. 3. Provide the additional information to correct/counter/give context to the point the argument in the meme is making.
B) 1. Pick an Issue. 2. Design a meme that slants by omission. 3. Provide the additional information to correct/counter the point the argument in the meme is making.
C) I would like to post some of the best memes. If you don't want your work posted on the blog, please let me know and I can post it anonymously or not at all.
D) Be sure to follow the instructions and create a meme that commits the specific fallacies--not just general poor arguments.
E) Read the following article http://www.vox.com/2014/12/22/7433899/debunk-how-to and answer the following questions (1) What is the background attitude one should have in order to avoid acquiring false beliefs? (2) What is the information deficit model and why doesn't it fully explain the backfire effect?
Bonus:
What critical thinking error was committed in HW 2B? How would you redo the homework assignment to avoid committing this error?
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