Critical Thinking - Exam 1 Flashcards

Critical thinkers make better decisions because they question their understanding of a subject before making a decision. Less of that creates decisions with a lack of understanding and thus they are often poor decisions.

Believing in God is rational because the potential gains are infinite and the potential losses are finite.

Limited scope

The wager only considers a Christian God and doesn't account for other gods or belief systems.

Inauthentic belief

The wager is based on probability and self-benefit, rather than a person's true beliefs.

Simplification

The wager simplifies complex conditions and ignores the variety of choices and repercussions people face.

Religion/Faith is cultural and geographical in nature. The right place at the right time. A belief that comes from a environment or situation.

1. (Authoritarian leader) Authoritarian leader whom believers are supposed to show unquestioned loyalty and obedience.

2. (Leader = Narcissist) The leader is usually a malignant narcissist, who lacks empathy.

3. (Discouraged Socialization) Members are discouraged from socializing with nonmembers except in cases of recruitment.

4. (On a mission) Members are told that they are on a mission.

5. (Everyone else wrong) Members are told that everyone who disagrees is wrong.

6. (Money to leader) Members are expected to give money to the leader.

7. (Bad Consequences) Members are threatened with bad consequences if they leave the group.

8. (Keep the secret) Members are told not to reveal inner workings to outsiders.

Peirce argues that the scientific method is the only truly reliable way to establish beliefs. 

1. The method of tenacity (found by those who hold beliefs dogmatically) - don't let it go no matter what (Dogma)

2. The method of authority (found by those who hold religious and political dogma) - consider the source beyond question

3. The a priori method (found among the rationalists) - pure reason

4. The method of scientific investigation (allowing for self-correction through empirical evidence, actively seeking out doubt, and being open to the possibility of being wrong,)

When denying magical beliefs is considered too costly, people will gladly give up their beliefs about scientific causation.

Magical thinking allows people to believe they have answers, which provides them with an illusory sense of control. (the illusion of control = a reduction in anxiety)

Remember: Subostski is subbing out due to cost and control

- Beliefs are rarely the product of exposure to facts. Cognitive psychology and neuroscience have both found that people form beliefs on the emotions of fear and anger more than on evidence and reason.

- Once beliefs are established, people seek out information that supports their beliefs and ignore information that runs contrary to their beliefs.

- The brain is hard-wired to protect us and one way it does this is by releasing chemicals that stimulate good feelings when exposed to information that agrees and therefore supports existing beliefs.

“Change is difficult because core cognitive constructs act like a mental filter to screen in confirming data and screen out disconfirming data.”

Neurobiology: When a person’s beliefs are challenged, distress is created. The brain then releases dopamine, which returns the person to the safety of his original belief and the good feeling it creates

Dogma: a belief that is accepted without being questioned or doubted.

Belief-By-Repetition

“It is wrong always for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.”

1. Independent confirmation of the facts.

2. Substantive debate on the state of the evidence by experts.

3. Do not rely on a person or book as an unchallenged authority.

4. Entertain multiple working hypotheses. Devise tests to determine whether one hypothesis is able to withstand the rigor of investigation.

5. Do not attach yourself to an idea because you like it, or see it as yours.

6. Use quantifiable data when able, to assure precision.

7. Eliminate hypotheses that possess unnecessary assumptions (Occam's Razor)

8. Determine whether the hypothesis can be falsified. If its incapable of being disproven, it is impossible to prove true and is being held without evidence. (If a believer claims that every possible outcome proves his hypothesis true, the hypothesis is valueless.) Example: "The universe was created by a higher power."

Meme: Anything that gets initiated (an idea) any idea whatsoever

A meme is a unit of information in a mind whose existence influences events such that more copies of itself get created in other minds.

A non-mind virus idea is a belief you can account for, one that has evidence.

A Mind Virus: an idea that is being imitated

You can't recount the idea because you imitated it and you have no good reason to follow it besides other people believing in it. No evidence No argument

What makes a good meme "good" is that fact that it becomes viral not matter if the idea/information is good or bad. It always gets copied the exact same way.Bad meme could either not go viral at all, or when it does go viral it does not get imitated the same but instead it evolve from person to person.

Smart/important information = survival value

1. Danger

2. Food

3. Sex

- Conditioning (easiest method to spread mind viruses) - repetition

- Cognitive Dissonance

A. Create tension (make them uncomfortable (upset))

B. Reward (compliment/agree) and punish their responses (if they disagree) often use scare tactics

C. Once successful compliment - make them feel good

- Trojan Horse

A. Establish common ground

B. Common Ground + Mind Virus (Slip in the mind virus)

C. Sell the entire thing as one united package

Absolute truth - Universal truth that applies to everybody

Indexical Truth -  Truth that applies to only certain people, time, places, IE. relative truths

a problem that cannot be solved, IE Religion

Tradition - The longer the idea has hung around the truer it must be right?

Heresy - Heresy is any belief that goes against the dogma of a religion.

Evangelism - The evangelism strategy meme replicates because it’s shouting “Spread me to new people!”

(Not) Making sense - Religion gives you unbelievably simple and stupid answers to really tough questions.

- A readiness to replicate information accurately

- Obeying instructions and coding that information

1. Convinced by an inner conviction that something is true this is called Faith. (Blind Faith)

A. Passionate

B. No Evidence

C. No logical arguments

2. Typically make a positive virtue of faith being strong and unshakable in spite of not being based upon evidence.

3. Mystery is good. Embrace mystery and ridicule evidence.

4. Intolerance toward rival faiths or heretics, viewed as dangerous towards their faith. (Creates violence)

2 forms

Extreme

Less extreme

5. The patient notices that his beliefs are based on the accident of birth. Didn't choose religion/beliefs. Take them epidemically. (Dependent on the culture you are born into)

6. Conversion (The Guru Effect) - if one is to come to a belief later in life it's almost always an emotional conversion. Not logic, Not evidence.

7. Religion and faith, It feels good.

Science (Safeguarded from being a virus )

Start with a hypothesis (possible explanation)

Goes through deduction (if my hypothesis is correct what are the observable consistent results)

Induction (The testing phase)

You are right = body of evidence

Creates a scientific theory

You are wrong = counter-example (Go back and revise your hypothesis)

This means science catches errors, Good well-supported theories

Religion (Why it is a mind virus)

Doctrines (set of beliefs) That are believed to be absolutely true

Scripture (absolutely true)

Revelation (absolutely true)Neither can be tested and it creates circularity

No hypothesis, Deduction, Induction, theoriesCircular reasoning because There is no error-catching

Claim: Any sentence that has a truth value.

2 types

**Factual** - truth value is determined by empirical evidence

**Value** - truth value is not determined by empirical evidence, moral

1. Moral 2. Non-Moral - subjective (personal preferences)

Arguments: Purpose: To settle disagreement - The goal is consensus

4 Clues to find a conclusion

- Most controversial claim

- Generalizations

- Author making a judgment - "should, right"

- Any words considered to be conclusion indicators, "There for"

Therefore, thus, which implies, consequently, to follows that, as a result, which means that, ergo, etc.

1. Education and training from reputable institutions or programs in the relevant field (usually evidenced by degrees or certificates)

2. Experience in making reliable judgments in the field (generally the more years of experience the better) Your level of experience

3. Good reputation among peers

4. Profesional accomplishments

But, unfortunately, people can have the requisite education and experience and still not know what they’re talking about in the field in question.

Personal Experience - Evidence of your senses - famously bad evidence

Impairment

sensory

memory

Expectation bias (Placebo Effect)

Experimental Group

Control Group

Innumeracy - misunderstanding coincidence

Choosing the information that agrees with you (echo chamber)

Occurs when someone focuses on evidence that is readily available, memorable, or psychologically compelling, instead of considering all evidence

Argument = settle disagreement

Explanation = solving mysteries

1. Testability - Whether there is some way to determine if a theory is true

- Ad hoc explanations** cant be tested ( You can't prove them to be true or false)

2. Fruitfulness - The number of novel predictions made

- successful risky (precise and accurate) predictions

3. Scope - The number of diverse phenomena explained

- The more the explanation proves the better

4. Simplicity "Ockham's Razor" - The amount of diverse phenomena explained

- Get rid of assumptions you don't need (path of least resistance)

5. Conservatism - How well a theory fits with existing knowledge

- conserve your explanation to that which is already known before jumping into the unknown. Stick to the known before going to the unknown

Post hoc reasoning (Bases for superstition) - just because one event occurs after another event, the first event must have caused the second event.

Counter Examples

x ------> y

chicken Great Game

-x ------> y

no chicken Good Game

x ------> -y

Chicken Bad Game

This disproves it

Gamblers Fallacy

1. Post Hoc Reasoning

2. Start believing falsely that the laws of probability apply to small numbers

They believe probability laws apply to small numbers or sequences, when in fact they don't.The riskier your investment the more superstitious you become. Celebrities and Athletes are more likely to have the gambler's fallacy.

A belief that some secret but influential organization is responsible for an event or phenomenon.

They believe they have the truth, believe the government is responsible for grand conspiracy's that are going on

Making outrages claims in order to gain attention IE: Alex Jones, Donald Trump

Phycologists have learned when you confront conspiracy theorist with facts it will backfire and they will think you are apart of the conspiracy

Because religion is a conspiracy theory, you've been groomed to think conspiracy theories are already a fabric of the universe itself

We conform to group pressure - We fall for repetition even if we know better (People are subject to group conformity)

People with the lowest levels of knowledge constantly rank themselves as ones with the highest amount of knowledge. You don't know what you don't know. (Low metacognition)

Ones ability to accurately assess ones knowledge

Misinformation, Clickbait, False Experts, Claim Offered Without Evidence, Propaganda.

False information, motive unknown.

Intentionally lying to people, Example: “The fact is, we won the presidential election; we won it big.” Donald Trump

Hyperbolic headline designed to get people to click on a link. Example: “Doctors are on the verge of curing cancer.” “How to grow hair with one simple trickle.

Using alleged experts who are, in fact, either not experts or are dubious experts. Example: “Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn’t feel good and changes – AUTISM. Many such cases!” ~ Donald Trump

Offering factual information that has no evidence to support it. (Notice, unlike misinformation that can be proven to be false, claims without evidence cannot be proven false, but simply have no evidence to support them.) Example: “From my office in trump towers, when 9/11 happened I witnessed thousands of people on the roofs in new jersey celebrating.”

Disguise an actual source and instead cast responsibility onto another group of people. Example: “Earlier today, the Capitol was under siege; there were reports that antifa sympathizers were sprinkled throughout the crowd.” ~ Laura Ingraham, FOX News

Biased promotional material, often used to make a group of people appear to be evil or not fully human…particularly scare tactics that are not grounded in fact. “Left wing mobs have torn down our founders, desecrated our memorials, and carried out a campaign of violence and anarchy.” ~ Donald Trump

Almost always has fear behind it.

- Repetition

- Manipulation

- Anti Democratic - take voting rights away

if you want people to believe a lie you simply have to repeat it over and over and belief will come.

the action of deliberately arousing public fear or alarm about a particular issue.

Hot Read = You cheat by gathering information in advance on your victim before the read.

Cold Read = You don't know anything about them, you have to get the information right then and there through them.

There is no way to test it (You can't prove them to be true or false)

All you can do is prove that it might not likely be true

If something has no physical evidence so it we cant prove it to be true, then it cannot be proven true.

What he proved: Randi debunked many paranormal claims, including fairies and telekinesis.

What he didn't prove: Randi never proved the existence of supernatural powers or beings. He offered a $1 million prize to anyone who could prove their own supernatural powers or the presence of a supernatural being, but no one ever came forward.

Bedrock for scientific reasoning, guards against expectation BiasYou make sure that the researchers and the research subject has no cross communication between them

When you are a psychic and you generalize information about someone know that the information can apply to anyone, and you will be correct. The moment those predictions/generalizations start to be more precise, they are almost every time incorrect.

An explanation using an integrated set of principles that organizes observations and predicts behaviors or events. Has evidence and some data backing it up

A supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation.

A hypothesis is an educated guess to explain something. A theory is backed up with experiments and results.

1) Guilty of simple factual or formal errors.2) Logical contradictions.3) Unfair to opposition-unfair to opponents.4) Strongly emotional dismissive.5)Out of date evidence-information not valid no more.6)Most other experts disagree.