Aaron From Minnesota

Before I answer this week's questions, I invite you to listen to my favorite Talking Heads song. It's from the perspective of a paranoid man afraid of his urban environment. (Gittins 2004)  In particular, the lyrics " Facts all come with points of view . Facts don't do what I want them to . Facts just twist the truth around . Facts are living turned inside out." reflect the worldview of a person who is not happy when presented with facts that disagree with what he wants and/or believes to be the "truth."   When Crosseyed and Painless was released in 1980, there were only three television networks that aired national news, and most major geographical areas had an independently owned and operated newspaper.  People had no choice but to be exposed to facts, as curated by journalists and experts.  Social media now drives the way many of us engage with real life. And what we see on social media is dictated by algorithms that are designed to keep us on that ...

Just like last week, I started out thinking I was going to be writing about one thing and ended up writing about another. I saw a headline pop up on my "new tab" home screen about a female Olympian supporting ICE . So I figured I'd be writing about that and prepared myself to be very angry. But while it did make me angry, the article actually did not contain any fallacies related to the athlete's support for seemingly all of the current administration's policies and behaviors -- that is, until it got to her opposition for transgender women competing in athletic events with other women. That's when the author of the article said this:   This is the bandwagon fallacy. Whether or not most Americans are currently against trans athletes is irrelevant to the debate about whether whatever advantages trans athletes may (or may not) have should exclude them from participation in sports.  I also need to share this "life hack" that was at the bottom of that pa...

  I really wanted to try to find something organically for this assignment, and I figured it wouldn’t be that hard. But it turns out my online life is in an even bigger echo chamber than I thought. I went for a whole week, keeping an eye out for arguments in which multiple sides were represented in a meaningful way, but all I could find were posts of stories and then some number of comments either agreeing or disagreeing with the topic.  I came really close to ignoring everything meaningful and going with “Does Eli Manning deserve to be in the NFL Hall of Fame?” And while clearly he does not (sorry if anyone in this class is a Giants fan) the arguments were still basically “yes he does, you idiot” and “no he doesn’t, you idiot” which I decided was not terribly productive.  Then one of my favorite musicians - Grammy Award winning bluegrass singer and guitarist Billy Strings - changed the lyrics to one of his songs to include current events, and an anti-ICE message.  ...

I wanted to take a look at Sweetwater.com , my musical instrument and equipment dealer of choice for probably more than 20 years now.  The top of the website contains a large repeating video, which shows a guitar technician setting up and putting strings on a guitar, under the text "You Deserve a Great Guitar" which I happen to agree with, even if my budget does not.     Under this, there are sections for different categories of items they sell:   Below that there's a section called "hottest gear" for new items, another section for best selling guitars and exclusive guitars, than an ad for an exclusive effects device ... then another section called "trending gear" then there's more and more featured instruments and deals, then eventually you get to an ad for financing, an ad for the "gear exchange" which lists used equipment ... then more "hot deals," then a handful of articles on gear and recording techniques, then a link to th...

I listened to two podcasts, NPR's Up First , and Effectively Wild: A Fangraphs Podcast. I chose Up First because it was the podcast I listened to the most when I was commuting regularly. But I wasn't sure if it was too "radio" to count as a true podcast, so I added my favorite baseball podcast, Effectively Wild.  There were a few distinct differences between the two podcasts when it came to delivery.    On Up First, the hosts (A. Martinez and Leila Fadel) were authoritative when delivering news, and adopted a more curious and inquisitive tone when speaking with reporters from the field about the stories they were covering. It didn't sound like anyone was doing a "news voice" (which would have detracted from the authenticity of the hosts) and everyone was calm and relatively casual, even when discussing serious topics like nuclear negotiations with Iran. But it did sound just like listening to NPR on the radio. I suspect some - if not all - of the show w...

I was completely engrossed in the "debate" here between Marc Prensky (Prensky 2012) and Paul Kirschner (Kirschner 2016) about the existence of "digital natives," whether or not they have different skills, and whether education should be catering more to their abilities and tendencies. I was curious so I looked it up, and it seems as though Prensky never directly responded to Kirschner's criticism, which is a shame, because I think he's right ... kind-of. To me the debate all comes down to the section in Kirschner's article where he's focused on the indisputable fact that humans cannot truly "multi-task" and that studies show that there's correlation between people who are frequent media multi-taskers (MMTs) and reduced grey matter in the anterior singulate cortex.  ...there is evidence that constantly switching between tasks may be lead to a person losing the ability to focus on a single task and/or ignore distracters and that intensive...