Guerrilla Mythbusting: 5 Snappy Rules For Spotting and Exposing Popular Nonsense
College students tend to wax enthusiastic about the lessons they pick up in class. Curiously, this very admirable trait, a thirst for knowledge, has a downside to it. When one learns at a rate best described as “alarming,” which college students often must do, little time exists to sit and sift through all that new material carefully. And this burdensome task would mandate yet more study time, which luxury few students can afford.
This means that, for very practical reasons, they will tend to accept readily the sermons that echo from academic pulpits. Consumers of media information have nearly the same problem — a large flow of information thrust at them, and little houston townhomes and condos all bills paid time to sort through it. Election years only magnify this problem, and political candidates can grind axes with the best of them. When a scandal breaks out, the media blitz can sometimes blind even the more critical viewers. So we have done some of the extra homework for these groups to help them make the best of this unhappy situation. Here, we offer a clear-headed set of rules to disperse the fog quickly, adding daylight to the topic at hand.
As a first step in adopting a cautiously critical posture, we would like to introduce the rule, “take careful notes and develop a long memory by referring back to them now and again.” Spin-doctors count on the fact — a most unhappy truth — that most people do not remember what the sales script said that they fed to the masses last week. This way, when they later change the story, you can call them on it. If it’s a political speech in question, “Tivo” it, Nokia N73 so you can play it back when later when spin proponents deny that their guy ever said it in the first place.
Second, isolate the parts of the speech or lecture that seem to form the main points of the argument. Often this or that advocate will avoid stating the main points of his argument explicitly, only implying them. Make the implied parts explicit yourself by asking, “what assumption(s), does this depend upon that he has not stated openly?” Then write them down. For instance, if one were to argue, “We had to attack his country because the guy is a tyrant,” then note that this assumes — unless otherwise qualified — that we must attack all countries where tyrants rule. Given today’s political climate, this would not promote a very promising course of action. So stated, we would have to attack almost everyone, starting with the I.R.S.
So remember to make a list of the important claims in question — whether the speaker or writer has stated, implied, or simply assumed them.
Third, “Always examine a claim by itself first.”
This provides a fast and easy way to prevent reckless professors, for instance, from hoodwinking students into bogus philosophies (as is their
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