Argumentation

My favorite scientists and astronomers

Hi,
so I came up with this idea of list of people that I admire in science. Those are not usually scientists most like ex-scientists who are writing, blogging, learning students and so on.

I want to start with Phil Plait also known as Bad Astronomer. Why? Because he is famous

Philip Plait 2007.jpg

Phil

skeptic in the science community who is leading the league against Moon hoax. When I was writing about moon landing I cited his work quite a few times. He also wrote the book Death form the skies and he was featured in Crash Course Astronomy which was pretty cool, here are some links:

His blog.

His first blog (mostly bad astronomy).

Crash Course Astronomy

Second person in my list is Neil deGrass Tyson. He is astrophysicist, also sceptic and agnostic. He makes quite often fun of Flat Earth and is pretty cool.

Video

Demonstrating the power of gravity in the response to rapper singing about Flat Earth.

Another of my favorite scientists is Bill Nye. I am pretty sure that you know this one.

Science BOSS.

I actually saw him for the first time in USA in science class but actually listened to some of his talks few months ago for the first time. While he is very popular generally I kind of liked his debate with Ken Ham.. watch it, it is worth the 3 hours when you will witness the worst kind of argumentation in all history of creationism 😉 [1]

I would add Michio Kaku but I did not see so much stuff from him so I will just leave it here.

Dragallur

[1] Check out Ken Ham memes, those are best!

Argumentative foul: Emphasis on unknown authority

Hi,
last time I mentioned straw man as the first argumentative foul, today I will continue with the emphasis on unknown authority.

I think that this one is very very famous. Just take the following sentence.

American scientists say that apples are poisonous!

You have hears something like this, starting or ending with some authority. The last time I remember hearing it was when me and some people were talking about what is called: consciousness after death. Few were christians and their opinion is that it proves God. To make their argument stronger they said:

Even scientists proved that some people remembered things when their brain did not show any evidence of functioning!

It is kind of hard to say something against it, because scientists are authority, but unknown. The problem is that nobody else then them knew anything about the authority and it could seem kind of reasonable to believe it, because scientists must be right.

Do not get fooled.

What was their source? Did the source said the same thing? What is their definition of scientist? Why could actually such a thing be true when it collides with the rest of science?

Such an authority can be for example government, or doctors, or people who work there a long time and have experience.

 

Feel free to share you experience with argumentative foul in comments!

Dragallur

 

Argumentative foul: The Straw Man

Hi,
I decided to make some post about argumentation, this is partial because of what happened today (which was quite interesting though I will write about it a bit later) and also because argumentation is so important to me. Probably the first argumentative foul that has ever been known to me was the “straw man”.

I heard about straw man for the first time when my brother showed me some meme and there were those two words.

So I asked: “What does straw man means?”

“Imagine debating with me about God, I would be an atheist and you the one who believed in God. We would make some arguments and then I would say: Imagine old man sitting on a cloud with shiny thing around his head looking down and letting people do wars.”

This is nice example of straw man, in this situation I believe in God and the other person does not even need to know what I exactly mean by God but he says this. Creating an argument which I do not even need to believe in, making it ironic or so. This is the building of straw man, now he burns this straw man down by saying: “Could you really imagine it? This is so stupid, old man on cloud -_-.”

This is of course argumentative foul because I never said something about old man sitting on cloud, plus the person is acting ignorant. Of course you can not always see it so easily but once you know that it exists you can detect when this straw man is being build so dont let yourself be thrown down by such a thing.

Dragallur

2nd foul: Emphasis on unknown authority