Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Critical thinking exercise

Alright, I said I would revisit Zeitgeist and Loose Change so here it goes.
First of all, Zeitgeist is overloaded with religious bits and I really don't want to go there.
That leaves the Loose Change video. So, for those of you with a couple hours of free time on your hands, here's an exercise in critical thinking. First of all, watch Brian Duning's introduction to critical thinking, Here Be Dragons. Yes, it is important you watch this one first. Now that you have all the ideas from that rattling around in your mind, take a look at the video Loose Change and apply all your critical thinking tools to the arguments put forth in the show. One thing that is important is to look at each piece of, "evidence," separately. A tactic used by some people advocating off the wall theories is to overwhelm folks with an avalanche of little tidbits, digressions, red herrings and the like. You can see this argument put to use by people who think the moon landings were a hoax. The problem with that tactic is that a load of poor arguments do not add up to one compelling argument. A person who uncritically looks at Loose Change might be persuaded by the sheer number of things they put forth in their video. If anybody finds a compelling argument in the loose change video, I'd like to know about it. Personally, I wasn't convinced. Well, tighten up your thinking caps and have fun.

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