According to Carl Sagan, there is baloney everywhere and we must be able to spot the truths among the lies, cons, and exaggerations if we are to protect ourselves from false information, and being conned. Sagan’s essay The Fine Art of Baloney Detection provides a set of rules to follow that can help determine baloney from truth and facts. Sagan provides nine rules to help in skeptical thinking and determining lies from truths, some being more useful than others.
The first rule is that there must always be a confirmation of so-called facts separate from where the so-called facts are stated. This tool is particularly useful because it protects the user from information coming from only one source, and information that could be formulated with the intent to help sell a product, such as found in infomercials and ads. If one was purchasing a new set of headphones or a keyboard for example, that are marketed as a gaming equipment, the
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This tool is useful because it quickly weeds out overcomplicated explanations and answers, however it is not always true, so it is best paired with other tools to validate that an answer is correct. An example of Occam’s razor say you are sitting at a red light and you hear screeching and a loud smashing noise. Multiple hypothesis can be formulated for the cause of the noises, such as a car going too fast could not stop and crashed into other cars causing an accident, or someone purposefully caused a situation where the car would need to slam its brakes causing it to crash into other cars and cause an accident in order to make an insurance claim. Of the previous two hypothesizes the claim that the car was going too fast and could not stop is the simpler of the two and according to Occam’s Razor is most likely correct as it is simpler to explain than the second hypothesis claiming insurance
“ Some Close Encounters of a Mental Kind ” by Stephen Jay Gould is about the tendency for our minds to ‘lie’ to ourselves because of a certain key phrase that can cause people to believe certain events happened. This can be done by altering the types of question you want the victim to hear. It can be a certain modified questions or the way the question are presented to us that can cause our answers to be slightly false.
“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true” (Kierkegaard)- Misleading oneself by accepting things as true or valid when they are not is a common phenomenon of nearly every human being, especially when faced with life changing of threatening situations. Self-deception can therefore be considered an option to escape reality in order to prevent oneself from dealing with the weight of a situation. Basically, those strong influencing psychological forces keep us from acknowledging a threatening situation or truth. However, oftentimes people do not realize that they are deceiving themselves, for it is mostly the action of the subconscious mind to protect especially the psychological well- being. This psychological state is depicted and in Ambrose Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”. He shows that people try to escape reality and seek refuge in self-deception when confronted with life-threatening situations, through characterization, alternate point of view, and the fluidity of time.
The hard, logical proof used to persuade is called logos. Authors use this technique to support their propositional statements in an argument. By supporting an opinion with a sufficient amount of data, an audience is able to find the argument believable. Logos, however, goes beyond the abundance of information geared toward swaying an opinion into agreement. Presenting facts also includes decisions such as which ...
1. Video “Here Be Dragons” by Brian Dunning (4/15/14) is a fresh and critical overlook on the huge variety of so called “dragons” which exist in abundance even in our civilized society. This video promotes critical thinking and demonstrates the “red flags” that one has to look out for in order to detect pseudosciences. A pseudoscience is an idea that claims to be real but is not backed by any real science or evidence. For instance, hair analysis, feng shui, psychokinesis, homeopathy, numerology, aura analysis, the list could go on forever. The warning signs for such “sciences” are - appeal to authority, ancient wisdom, confirmation bias, confuse correlation with causation, red herring, proof by verbosity, mystical energy, suppression by authority, all natural and ideological support. The one “red flag” I have always been skeptical about and this video confirmed it for me is “appeal to authority”. It is hard for me to understand how people actually trust advertisements that are simply screaming “we are specialists, look at our white lab coats and and all the certificates and the celebrities that support our product”. It is simply pathetic. As Brian says - “Good science presents good data, it does not aim to impress”. However, the one “red flag” that I have to be careful about myself is confusing correlation with causation. It is the natural human tendency to assume that, if two events or phenomena consistently occur at about the same time, then one is the cause of the other. Our weakness for this tactic is often exploited by scammers and bogus scientists when they want to persuade us that a relationship exists between two variables without providing supporting evidence. In order to secure ourselves from falling for all the nonsense...
One of the last types of ways investigators are coached to detect deception is in the behavioral attitudes of a person being interviewed such as being unconcerned or over anxious (Kassin, 2005). The success rate of looking for these cues are very successful in telling if an individual is being deceitful and has surpassed any laboratory tests conducted on the subject. The laboratory test however did reveal some interesting facts. The research showed that people who had training and experience did not score better than the control group who received no training. In fact all individuals scored at the chance level with the people who had training scored just above chance or at the chance level. To check if special training in the detection of deception was more accurate a study ...
Success. Seven letters, two syllables, and essentially, the goal of almost every person to walk the planet. The interesting thing about success is that it isn’t a set in stone goal, but an ideology. With each person, success is redefined, argued, and tried. Success comes in different forms and levels, but at the end of the day every person who has been deemed successful mentions one word: failure. Yet, it isn’t failure in of itself that produces success, but the determination and desire to work through it. Failure can only indoctrinate when an individual decides to work past it and improve from it. Often, however, the strenuous process of failure and grit is glamorized, and the true factors that play into success are forgotten. For example,
However, there are four general categories of cues that people can use to detect both deception and scams, which include signs of nervousness, suppression, easily agitated or anxious, and idiosyncratic sources (von Hippel & Trivers, 2011). Sometimes it is easier to detect when something is a bit off. People who are familiar with each other 's habits can also detect deception via idiosyncratic signs of nervousness, suppression, and cognitive load, because different individuals reveal their mental states in different ways (von Hippel, & Trivers, 2011). For example, if a good friend, family or co-worker may all of a sudden start having behavioral changes or just start lying about something then that person will be able to tell something is
In Gabbert’s social misinformation experiment, researchers have found that misinformation received from social sources are more likely to be imprinted into a subjects memory and be recalled later. It can even have an effect on memories not even discussed. This can be detrimental to not only everyday scenarios but in a police investigation it can be harmful to the investigation. In an investigation if witnesses discuss what occurred and one gives a false memory then the police may arrest the wrong suspect. This is also important if the investigation...
Grubin, D., & Madsen, L. (2005). Lie detection and the polygraph: A historical review. Journal
Empirical research on deception has shown that people can compellingly fake feelings, personalities, and attitudes (DePaulo, 1992) but perceivers typically are not capable of recognizing the deception (Barrick and Mount, 1996; McFarland and Ryan, 2000; Furnahm, 1986; Sackett and Wanek, 1996; Torisand DePaulo, 1984). In fact it is well documented through years of deception detection experiments, that people are barely better than chance at identifying truth from lies. One meta-analysis (Bond and DePaulo, 2006) found that average accuracy in deception detection experiments was only 4% better than
Throughout The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, Holden Caulfield uses the word “phony” prolifically, using it to describe anything that hits the wrong side of his fancy. Despite Caulfield’s insistence that he hates phoniness, he himself often puts up a false front in various situations. As we will see, Caulfield’s view that most people are liars and fakes expresses disgust not with individual people but with himself and with life as a whole as well as a slightly nostalgic idealization of his memories.
Plummer, James C. "Decent Information?" Consumers’ Research Magazine Aug. 1996: 33. [An editorial on the CDA questioning it’s premise.]
Vrij, Aldert, Katherine Edward, Kim P. Roberts, and Ray Bull. "Detecting Deceit Via Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Behavior." Journal of Nonverbal Behavior Winter 24.4 (2000): 239-63. Print.
A few years ago I learned about the problem solving principle of “Occam’s Razor.” The theory defined in simple terms: when you have competing hypotheses, the one that makes the fewest assumptions is most likely to be the most accurate and should be
What she has discovered over her more than thirty-year career, is that when witnesses are primed with leading questions, the suggestibility of even one word can cause that information to be integrated into a person’s memory then combined with other information to create a composite memory of what they believe is an authentic occurrence, but in reality, it is misinformation acceptance. Here some examples that Dr. Loftus has used in her