Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Contents contributed and discussions participated by mmckenziejr01

Contents contributed and discussions participated by mmckenziejr01

Simple Middle Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics
mmckenziejr01

The Most Egregious Straw Men of 2016 | Inverse - 0 views

www.inverse.com/...aw-men-arguments-politics-2016

straw man fallacy cognitive biases politics

shared by mmckenziejr01 on 24 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Fallacies are illicit shortcuts in reasoning, bad arguments that sound good but don’t actually make logical sense. Politicians and other public figures use them all the time ad nauseam in speeches and debates in order to better capture the hearts and minds of their audience.
  • But of all the logical fallacies out there, one stands out as being particularly powerful and popular, especially in politics: the straw man.
  • But that’s the truth, and the truth is irrelevant when it comes to fallacies. Just the fact that Clinton mentioned the term open borders, combined with her more liberal stance on immigration, was enough for Trump to say that she’s in favor of totally open borders
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The straw man fallacy involves the construction of a second argument that to some degree resembles, in a simplified or exaggerated way, the argument that your opponent is really making. It is much easier for you to attack that perverted point than it is to address the original point being made.
  • Clinton did not say she wanted to get rid of the Second Amendment in any sense. She had expressed support for expanding background checks and a possible assault weapons ban. Those things are reasonable (moderate, even), so it’s much simpler for Trump to ignore her argument and make one up for her
  • What are in large part reasonable measures taken to avoid unnecessary offences are recast by these Republicans to be softness or attacks on people’s freedom of speech. By connoting political correctness with these attributes, Republican politicians can ensure that their constituent remains hostile to the idea. Then, when they come across an argument in need of simplification, they can call back to that already-crafted association.
  • Sanders’s healthcare plan would have ended Medicare and the ACA as we know them, but only to replace them with a universal healthcare system. No one stood to lose their coverage, but the way Clinton was arguing, it looked like people might. By essentially leaving out half of Sanders’s argument, Clinton made a case against a fictional version of Sanders that seemed just real enough to fool the average voter.
  • Still, mostly everyone today understands that the Earth isn’t flat. They recognize that, as Scaramucci said, “science” got one wrong there. By equating these two concepts, he assumes any argument that recognizes climate change to also be one that claims the Earth is flat. For that reason, this particular brand of climate change denial wins the award for best (or maybe worst) straw man of 2016.
  • mmckenziejr01 on 24 Nov 17
     
    Here are a few examples of candidates using straw man fallacies to try to win over voters during the 2016 election. This shows just how prevalent cognitive biases are in our everyday lives without us even noticing them.
mmckenziejr01

Forer effect - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com - 0 views

skepdic.com/forer.html

Forer effect confirmation bias cognitive biases

shared by mmckenziejr01 on 31 Oct 17 - Cached
  • orer eff
  • The Forer effect refers to the tendency of people to rate sets of statements as highly accurate for them personally even though the statements could apply to many people.
  • Forer gave a personality test to his students, ignored their answers, and gave each student the above evaluation. He asked them to evaluate the evaluation from 0 to 5, with "5" meaning the recipient felt the evaluation was an "excellent" assessment and "4" meaning the assessment was "good." The class average evaluation was 4.26. That was in 1948. The test has been repeated hundreds of time with psychology students and the average is still around 4.2 out of 5, or 84% accurate.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • In short, Forer convinced people he could successfully read their character.
  • his personality analysis was taken from a newsstand astrology column and was presented to people without regard to their sun sign.
  • People tend to accept claims about themselves in proportion to their desire that the claims be true rather than in proportion to the empirical accuracy of the claims as measured by some non-subjective standard.
  • The Forer effect, however, only partially explains why so many people accept as accurate occult and pseudoscientific character assessment procedures
  • Favorable assessments are "more readily accepted as accurate descriptions of subjects' personalities than unfavorable" ones. But unfavorable claims are "more readily accepted when delivered by people with high perceived status than low perceived status."
  • mmckenziejr01 on 31 Oct 17
     
    From the reading, the Forer effect seemed to be a good example of a couple cognitive biases together. The experiment and some of the findings are very interesting.
mmckenziejr01

10 People With Photographic Memories | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...0-people-photographic-memories

memory eidetic memory

shared by mmckenziejr01 on 23 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • there are plenty of people who have claimed to possess eidetic memory
  • he had no problem memorizing entire books, but also experienced random, blinding flashes of light that were sometimes accompanied by hallucinations.
  • had detailed flashbacks to earlier parts of his life and could visualize his inventions in astonishing, complicated detail before he even started
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Teddy Roosevelt could recite entire newspaper pages—not just articles—as if they were sitting in front of him.
  • is reported to have read two or three books a day.
  • was said to have memorized every word of every book he had ever read, estimated at around 9000. It took him up to just 12 seconds to read one page, and each eye could read a page independently.
  • "Kim's story tells us that the human brain is far more flexible than we had thought,"
  • "Like many other savants, he has suffered disability in one area of his brain, but has compensated by acquiring remarkable new abilities in other areas. This shows we all have considerable hidden intellectual potential."
  • may have had a type of photographic memory that helped him memorize sheet music with astonishing speed.
  • Russian composer Alexander Siloti would give him complicated and demanding works to learn and Rachmaninov (also spelled Rachmaninoff) would have them completely memorized to perfection a day or two later.
mmckenziejr01

The Truth About Photographic Memory | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...ruth-about-photographic-memory

memory science brain science photographic memory eidetic memory research

shared by mmckenziejr01 on 05 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • According to mounting evidence, it's impossible to recall images with near perfect accuracy.
  • But people with Herculean memories tend to be adept at one specific task—i.e., a person who memorizes cards may be inept at recognizing faces.
  • Alan Searleman, a professor of psychology at St. Lawrence University in New York, says eidetic imagery comes closest to being photographic.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • While people can improve their recall through tricks and practice, eidetikers are born, not made, says Searleman. The ability isn't linked to other traits, such as high intelligence. Children are more likely to possess eidetic memory than adults, though they begin losing the ability after age six as they learn to process information more abstractly.
  • Although psychologists don't know why children lose the ability, the loss of this skill may be functional: Were humans to remember every single image, it would be difficult to make it through the day.
mmckenziejr01

Does Photographic Memory Exist? - Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...eloped-what-appears-to-be-a-ph

memory brain science science photographic memory eidetic memory

shared by mmckenziejr01 on 05 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • The intuitive notion of a “photographic” memory is that it is just like a photograph: you can retrieve it from your memory at will and examine it in detail, zooming in on different parts. But a true photographic memory in this sense has never been proved to exist.
  • Most of us do have a kind of photographic memory, in that most people's memory for visual material is much better and more detailed than our recall of most other kinds of material.
  • Sorry to disappoint further, but even an amazing memory in one domain, such as vision, is not a guarantee of great memory across the board.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • A winner of the memory Olympics, for instance, still had to keep sticky notes on the refrigerator to remember what she had to do during the day.
  • mmckenziejr01 on 05 Oct 17
     
    I was researching photographic memory to go off of our discussion last class. It's more scientific name is eidetic memory (this is also more useful to google if you're looking for information).
1 - 5 of 5
Showing 20▼ items per page