Applied Epistemology

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On one of my last quizzes of the semester in critical thinking, I give the following example of bad reasoning (taken almost verbatim from a real think tank report I found on the web):

In 1964, when the bracero program ended, 86,597 people were apprehended by the INS for illegal immigration. In 1976, INS apprehensions were 875,915—a more than 1,000% increase. This indicates there was a significant rise in illegal immigration.

Occidental seems to be turning to Iraq as a model of stability.

Man, this is a dumb piece -- only good as an example of imagining causation on the flimsiest of correlations. (I'll have to remember to extract a bit for a future exam question.) But then, RealClearPolitics is pretty nakedly ideology-driven. That a Harvard professor of economics linked to it approvingly, however, is a real clear cause for alarm.

The NYT reports on a lavish exercise in futility. Prof. Kevin Padian of Berkeley may have the distinction of introducing the word "crap" (a technical term in this context, I agree) into the pages of the Grey Lady: "[we were] just astounded at its size and production values and equally astonished at what a load of crap it is."

Slate has found out.

I have to say that I'm impressed at the amount of posthumous publicity Rorty has gotten. I suspect it's because he was really the only professional American philosopher who still tried to address the educated lay audience. (Also, I suspect he was the only philosopher whose ideas were intelligible to the humanities majors who go on to write for culture mags such as Slate.) With Rorty's passing, only philosophers such as Dan Dennett, Colin McGinn, Simon Blackburn, and Jerry Fodor are the tenuous threads between academic philosophy and the larger public sphere.

It's the end of the semester: time for viewer mail a new comment from my ratemyprofessors.com page!

Mr. Rooney is extremely arrogant, and unapproachable. He doesn’t answer emails, ever. I’m an A student and got a C in his class because he refused the extra credit I did, when it was too late to fix it! If you’re off by one point he will round down and give you the lower grade. Take someone else.

They create characters with two four-letter names. They make music. And more music, including songs with four-letter titles. And they play

Eugen Weber, professor of history at UCLA, is no more. I never saw him in person, but his 52 half-hour lectures on The Western Tradition were the core lectures you wish you could give off the top of your head and kept me avidly tuned to Philadelphia's PBS station every midnight while I was in grad school.

The two students who have attended class approximately twice since late March (whose previous email excuses were chronicled here) are at it again. Last time, they promised they'd show for the midterm (but they didn't). I figured that was the blessed end of my having to deal with them. But I was not so lucky. They have shown up twice since then, clearly not having the foggiest idea what was going on in the class. The night before the second major exam, I received the following missive: