Final Post

Another concept from the textbook that I found interesting was the concept of variation in the population. Since I am kind of a tech geek and go through a lot of computer equipment, I noticed that variation in the population can be a very important thing. Some products or brands have a higher failure rate than others, but it doesn’t mean that each and every product by that company is guaranteed to fail. For example, in a stack of hundreds of cds, you could have one or two that don’t work, or as many as five or six. This can help determine how reliable a product is, by basing the variation in a product that is supposed to be consistent in quality, you can make a generalization about the reliability of that product overall. However, there will still be some variation, like where the cds came from or if it was just a bad batch that got shipped out by accident.

Second Post

Well I can definitely say that I learned a lot from this course. There were a lot of concepts that were kind of difficult for me to grasp at first, but by going through the readings again, both the textbooks and the website, I think I was able to understand them better. I think I definitely saw a lot of examples of things that I learned in this class in my everyday life, and I started noticing more as the course went on. Things like advertising, political campaigns, and even stories in the news can all have a definite slant to them, so I think this class helped me understand how to identify and really examine what kind of claims are being made, and if they are really valid or not. Everyone these days is trying to sell you on their version of the truth, and I think this class helped me become more skilled at seeing this and be able to decide for myself how true it really is.

First Post

I thought the section on haphazard sampling in chapter 14 was interesting, especially since you still see many examples of this in advertising today. People who already use a product are asked about their feelings about that product, which can lead to a very different response than if people who had never used the product or who had used a competing product were asked the same question. However, I know from doing sampling for a class that it can be very difficult to ensure that a poll is not biased in any way. It can be hard to find a representative sample, since it can be hard to control some factors that may influence the results. It was tough to go around, saying the same thing over and over to different groups of people, then collecting the data and analyzing it is a lot of work, which is something I didn’t realize before I did the survey.

Third Post

#3) I thought that number 5 in section A helped me understand why the cause makes a difference. The example they gave reminded me of an episode of the Simpsons that I watched a while ago. After a bear attacks Homer, he convinces the city to spend a lot of money on a “Bear Patrol.” When Lisa tries to use critical thinking to point out that the Bear Patrol is not effective, Homer doesn’t understand, since the bear hasn’t come back since the patrol started. When she picks up a rock and says that she could just as easily say that the rock keeps away tigers, since there aren’t any around. Homer, not being a big critical thinker, immediately wants to buy the rock from her. These examples show why cause matters in a causal argument. Correlation isn’t enough, because lots of things can be explained by correlation that aren’t always true.

Question #2

#2) I thought the Mission Critical website was helpful because it is a good resource that lists all the concepts we have covered so far in this class. I have already used it a couple of times to look up some terms that I wasn’t really sure about from the reading. It’s good to use for reference since everything is indexed so you can find what you’re looking for really quickly. I think it is good how it breaks down each link into subtopics so you can see what is there before you click on it, so you’re not just clicking through pages and pages trying to find what you’re looking for. I think it will really help me out a lot with the writing for the rest of the class, as well as help me with studying for the final exam. I also liked the links to some of the other readings for critical thinking. I had read the story by Edgar Allen Poe, “The Purloined Letter,” before for English class but I never thought about it from a critical thinking perspective before now.

April 25th - May 1st Questions

#1) I think the example in the reading on the website where they discussed the case of a bicyclist that caused an accident between two cars really helped me understand the concept of plausibility in causal arguments better. I like to watch a lot of courtroom drama shows like “Law & Order” so by picturing this example as something like you’d see on the show, it helped me understand it better. Most of the time, as they investigate the case, more evidence that shifts the guilt from one person to another is uncovered as the show goes on. This example kind of reminded me of that in that it makes you stop and reassess each claim on its own for credibility. However, since it is a tv show, I think they expect you to accept some pretty unlikely or unbelievable causal arguments sometimes in the name of entertainment, so it’s hard to be too much of a critical thinker and still enjoy the show.

Question #2

I thought the idea of wishful thinking was interesting, because I didn’t realize that it would fall into the category of an appeal to emotion. I guess I thought of it as a kind of self-justification. I think a lot of people use wishful thinking today to try to justify their actions to themselves or to others. With the election season coming up, I’m sure there will be a lot more ads that use wishful thinking as an appeal to emotion. For example, I heard one on the radio the other day that talked about how great California was, and how we can get it back that way if we elect a particular candidate. This struck me as a type of wishful thinking, as an appeal to the voter’s sense of nostalgia. Just because someone wants things to be a certain way, doesn’t mean that they will be. As a state, California is always changing and adapting, so it can’t go back to the way it was. It is possible to move things forward with good policies and government, but to want it to return to some unrealistic previous version just seemed ridiculous.