AAPT Conference notes: Allyson Mount “Teaching Logic with Games and Muzzles”

She teaches logic to full classes “95% of whom actively don’t want to be there.” So she has to sell the course. [That’s pretty standard.]

Her course is half formal logic/half informal critical thinking. Venn diagrams, propositional logic.

Games motivate because they try strategies and they don’t work, so they see the need to improve their thinking.

Divide students into groups of 3 or 4 to play the games. More than 4 and you  get free riders.

She says she uses clickers and peer review in class, but won’t be talking about it today. [I want to hear her techniques here.]

Students who are really really struggling don’t like groups, because they are embarrassed at their lack of ability.

20-30 minutes a game. Doesn’t replace anything—just supplements.

Be really really explicit about what the point of the game and how it relates to the other material.

Sixty four squares

Good in the first session of class.

Draw a 8 by 8 grid on the board (number the columns, letter the rows.)

Goal: Find the secret square in as few questions as possible. Asking only yes/no questions.

The groups have to come up with a sequence of questions to ask that will get the answer quickest.

Worst strategy: Guess individual squares.

Best strategy: binary search—get it in 6 questions.

Tell the students to play out the strategies on their own.

After the small groups ask “Is there anyone who can get it in 3 questions?”

Have them play out the strategy—don’t have them explain it.

4?

5?

6?

Two groups will succeed at six. Ask what those two strategies they came up with have in common. Now we have an abstract solution.

Connect to the curriculum.

Variation: Now devise a strategy in which each yes/no question is either a conjunction or a disjuction.

How do you ask “Is the square B6” as a conjunction? As a disjunction?

[put a distracting pattern in the square, so they ask questions like “is it inside the smiley face or outside.” When you give the solution, point out that you have to abstract from the stuff that isn’t relevant.]

Set

www.setgame.com/set/index

Also a daily puzzle at the NYT.

Cards with 4 variables: color, shape, shading and number of symbols.

A set is three cards where each feature either matches on all three cards or are all different on all three cards.

Objective: Identify as many 3-card sets as possible.

Connect to the curriculum

·         Use venn diagrams to identify three random properties.

·         Talk about stipulative definitions.

·         Identify three random cards and have them identify categorical propositions. (No red card is solid, etc.)

Playing the game doesn’t directly relate to any lesson.

Problem: Two people in the room were red-green color blind.

Solution: write the names of the colors.

Andrew Mills: can you teach conditional reasoning asking students to fill in sets.

Other questions: How many sets can start with this card.

Fun thing to do: given 12 cards on the table, prove there are no sets there.

Wason selection task

www.philosophyexperiments.com/wason/default

Which cards to you turn over to verify a rule, like if a card has a circle on one side it is yellow on the other. If the person is drinking, then they are over 21.

Connect to the curriculum

Symbolize and use truth tables. The relevant line you need for the truth table is T → F. Have them note that the same line for the contrapositive claim.

Circle → Yellow                     ~Yellow → ~Circle.

T          T          T                      F          T          F

T          F          F                      T          F          F

F          T          T                      F          T          T

F          T          F                      T          T          T

Do at least a few weeks on truth tables before you introduce this.

So the Wason selection task is an add-on at the end of the truth table section, not a way to teach it.

Mills: This helps calm logic anxiety because you can talk about how people get the Wason task in the alcohol context and not others. 

Bioethics FAQ, Q6: We don't need animals for research, but we do need them to eat.

Research and survival are different. We need the nutrients that the animal provides as well as the fur to protect our bodies from the elements. Granted some of that can be found in plants but not all.

There is no need to eat meat for food. A vegetarian diet can be just as healthy as a diet with meat in it. According to Harvard nutritionist Marion Nestle "People who eat vegetarian diets are usually healthier – sometimes a lot healthier – than people who eat meat." The Mayo Clinic says that "A well-planned vegetarian diet can meet the needs of people of all ages, including children, teenagers, and pregnant or breast-feeding women."

When people say that you that you must eat meat to get all the nutrients you need, they are generally thinking of either B12 or Omega 3 fatty acids. B12 is only found in animal products. Omega 3 fatty acids are found in lots of common vegetarian foods, including tofu, but is not in a form that the body digests as easily as the form found in animal products.

The first thing to note is that these nutrients are only an issue for people who are fully vegan, and not just vegetarian. (Typically a vegetarian is defined as someone who eats no meat of any kind, and a vegan is someone who not only eats no meat, but also avoids animal products like eggs and cheese.) If you are a vegetarian for ethical reasons, the easiest way to be sure you get your B12s and easily digested Omega 3s is to find a source for eggs from chickens living in morally acceptable conditions.

Even for full fledged vegans, these nutrients don't have to be an issue. You can get B12 from vitamin supplements, which are fermented from bacteria, not taken from animals. And given how common foods with Omega 3s, including soy products and canola oil, are in vegetarian diets, I don't see that getting enough Omega 3s will be a problem for someone eating a healthy diet low in junk food.

Bioethics FAQ Q5: Why don't we experiment on prisoners, instead of innocent animals.

If we are going to use animals then we should at least use the humans in prison that act like animals. Why should something that has done nothing wrong be subjected to experimentation? People in prisons in our country have been found guilty of a crime like murder, assault, and rape. I think that people who with no doubt committed murder should no longer have a say and have that be how they contribute something back to society. They had rights when they were not committing crimes and knowingly killing and raping people. If they want rights they shouldve thought about that before taking away someone else. 

 Ever since the Nuremburg war trials again Nazi doctors, experiments on humans without their consent has been considered a war crime. This has been adapted by most countries, including the US, as a part of law. If you want to experiment on prisoners, you need to explain how it can possibly be consensual.

You might think that US prisons are different than prisoner of war camps, because the people there are guilty of things like murder, assult and rape. But this is not what is going on in most prisons. In 2006, 49.3% of state prisoners were in jail for nonviolent offenses. For federal prisons, that number is 90.7%. (See wikipedia, end of the fourth paragraph down.) The drug war is largely responsible for this. In 2004, the majority of (55%) prisoners in federal prison were there for drug offenses. The same year in state prisons, 22% of the prisoners were there for drug offenses. (See here.) For profit prisons also play a role here, because they lobby for tougher sentencing laws to increase their business, and hence their profit. (See here and here. In the most extreme case, a for builder of for-profit juvenile detention facilities in Pennsylvania bribed two federal judges to send innocent kids to their juvenile prisons. The judges in the case received 28 and 17 years in prison. The developers of the prisons who paid the bribes received 18 months and 12 to 18 monts.

You said, "They had rights when they were not committing crimes and knowingly killing and raping people. If they want rights they shouldve thought about that before taking away someone else." But most rights specified in the US consitition do not go away if you have committed a crime. In fact, many of them only make sense after a person has been accused of a crime. The right to a fair trial, the right to see the evidence presented against you and the right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment are all rights that you get after you enter the justice system.

It is also worth looking at what happens when people do experiment on prisoners. The most notorious cases of this are the Nazi war crimes, but this has happened in US prisons as well. In 1906 Dr Richard P Strong began experiments infecting prisoners in the Phillipenes, which was then a US possession, with cholera. Thirteen prisoners died when they were accidentally infected with bubonic plague. Six years later strong conducted lethal experiments where prisoners were infected with beriberi. The surviving prisoners were given cigars as compensation. For more information, see this article, called "They were cheap and available" on the history of experimentation on prisoners. The article was originally published in the British Medical Journal, but the full article was posted on a web page run by health case activists.

Bioethics FAQ 4: Active Euthanasia goes against the oath you take as a physician

The Hippocratic Oath says that a doctor should "never do harm" to patients--never "give a lethal drug to anyone if asked or advise such a plan." How then can a doctor justify assisted suicide or active euthanasia? And what worth is the oath if it can be compromised to benefit or comfort the patient in their final days? Is it time for more states to adopt the Death wih Dignity Act?

The original Hippocratic Oath, from 2,500 years ago, did ban euthanasia. However, no version of it has been legal binding for thousands of years. It is not even clear that the oath that is reprinted all the time these days was actually from the Hippocratic school—it may have been Pythagorean. The text we use was rediscovered in the middle ages and has been used ever since to inspire doctors. These days it often appears in some watered down form in medical school graduation ceremonies. When people water it down, the first thing they do is remove the politically controversial stuff, like the bans on euthanasia or abortion.

In the modern world, there are no binding oaths for doctors, but there are codes of ethics. The first important one is the the Nurembuerg code, established in the wake of war crimes trials against Nazi doctors. Together with other international documents like the Geneva Declaration and the Helsinki declaration it is the basis of the doctrine of informed consent in international law and ethics.

In the US, the most important ethical code is probably the American Medical Association's code of ethics. The AMA opposes both euthanasia (by which they seem to mean active euthanasia) and physician assisted suicide. There isn't any real teeth to this, though. It is simply marked as an "opinion" of the AMA. As far as I know, members of the AMA who issue lethal prescriptions under the Death With Dignity Act in Oregon (and now Washington!) are not sanctioned in any way. I'm not even sure the AMA lobbied against either state's Death with Dignity Act.

Listening to my niece watch Star Trek

I recall reading an interview with Ronald D. Moore (creator of the re-envisioned Battlestar Gallactica) where he talked about being a such a fan of the old Star Trek that he recorded the audio of the show by putting a tape recorder in front of his parents TV. He would then fall asleep listening to the show. He said that to this day he responds more to the audio cues in the old series more than anything else.

I totally know what he means right now.

Also, it is amazing how much work the melodramatic music by Alexander Courage is doing to keep the audience excited. It was really a very heavily scored show.

Bioethics FAQ 3: "Illegals receive free health care"

Is it ethical when illegal immigrants receive free health care coverage when U.S. citizens are denied?

Some factual background will help put this in context. Undocumented immigrants who show up at an emergency room can have their care covered by Medicaid. As soon as the patient is physically able to leave the hospital, the coverage stops. This same coverage is available to citizens and legal aliens, if they have no other means to pay for emergency care. It is provided as a part of the general principle accepted by American society, that emergency rooms should treat all comers who need it. There are no other federal assistance medical programs that undocumented immigrants are eligible for, although there are some states will use their money to provide care for the children of undocumented immigrants.

This this USA Today article from a while back suggests that, because they are generally young and healthy, undocumented immigrants account for less than 2% of health care spending in the U.S. This article in the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at health care spending on undocumented immigrants in North Carolina between 2001 and 2004 and found that an overwhelming 91% of the hospitalizations were for pregnancy and complications of pregnancy. In fact, 95% of the people seeking emergency treatment in this study were female, even though most immigrants are male.

The bottom line is that undocumented immigrants don't have access to any kind of care being denied citizens. Even if that were the case, though, there would be two solutions to the problem. One would be to deny the benefit to the undocumented people. For instance, among the 48,391 people seeking treatment in the North Carolina study were 7 minors under 18 needing emergency treatment for lupus. If you thought that they were receiving some kind of care that lupus patients who are citizens couldn't get, you could bar those 7 kids from the hospital. The alternative solution would be to insure that lupus patients who are citizens have access to all the treatment available. The sense of injustice comes from thinking that someone has access to something you don't. Whenever that happens, it is good to ask yourself "do I want to deny this to the other person, or gain it myself?"

Bioethics FAQ 2: Repeat abortion

I definitely believe that there should be a limit on abortions. Abortions should not be used as a type of birth control. Too many teenagers are having multiple abortions, and this is unacceptable. If a your woman makes a mistake that is one thing, but mistakes are supposed to be learning experiences. If abortions are used as a "way out"and there is no limit, I feel that abortions will become more and more common in the future.

I want to once again point people to this report from AGI on women who have repeat abortions. Their most important finding is that women who have repeat abortions are just as likely to be using contraception as women who have only one abortion

Regardless of whether they were obtaining a first or repeat abortion, just over one-half of women had been using contraceptives when they became pregnant, and this lack of an association holds up after controlling for other factors. Adolescent women obtaining repeat abortion are, in fact, slightly more likely than first-time abortion patients to have become pregnant while using a hormonal method.

This suggests that women who have repeat abortion are not using abortion as a form of birth control any more than women who have a single abortion.

Your comment indicated that you should expect that women who have had one abortion should have increased rates of birth control use. The statistic I found doesn't really speak to that, because it doesn't cover women who had a single abortion, remained sexually active, and did not have an unwanted pregnancy after that. It may be the case that large numbers of these women did in fact increase their birth control use.

Here are some other interesting correlations:

• women having repeat abortions are more likely than first-time abortion patients to have had prior births (76% vs. 47%), and many (19% vs. 8%) have had three or births
• Repeat abortions tend to cluster together. “Three-quarters of repeat abortions were reported to have occurred within five years of the prior procedure, including four in 10 within two years. Third and higher- order abortions appear to be even more closely spaced.” The authors speculate that this indicates “situational problems for some women in avoiding unintended pregnancy.”
• Women who have repeat abortion are also giving birth more often: “Women having repeat abortions are more likely than first-time abortion patients to have had prior births (76% vs. 47%), and more likely to have had many (19% vs. 8% have had three or more prior births).”

All of this points to the possibility that women who have repeat abortions are simply more fertile than other women. They aren't doing anything different. They just tend to get pregnant more often.

Bioethics FAQ. Q1: Abstinence is 100% effective.

I am creating a kind of FAQ for my bioethics classes. It is not exactly a FAQ, because many times, including this one, what I am replying to is not really a question. It is a false or misleading statement made by a student on the discussion boards or in the paper.

In a paper on abortion, a student writes

The only way not to get pregnant is not to have sex. I feel she should not be allowed to have an abortion for the simple fact that nothing can stop pregnancy and the only thing to prevent it is to not have sex at all. If you do not want a baby you should not have sex, period.

Abstinence may work 100% of the time, but vows of abstinence have a failure rate between 26% and 86%. Condoms, by comparison, fail 12% between and 70% of the time, almost always because they are used improperly. Used properly, condoms fail 0.5% and 7% of the time.

You say 'if you do not want a baby, you should not have sex,' but the situation isn't so simple. You cannot choose "no sex ever," as if you were selecting Safe Search on Google. You can pledge abstinence, but that will probably fail, at which point, it would be good to have a back up plan, such as using condoms and using them properly.

Even then, though, there is a chance you will still get pregnant. This brings us back to the issue of abortion. It is tempting to look at a pregnant woman considering abortion and think 'she is completely different than I am. I could never be in that position." But, in fact, she may have done all the things that you have done—taken a vow of abstinence, learned to use condoms correctly as a back up—and still wound up in that position. Like it or not, a lot of what separates you and her is just luck.

Call for online logic resource recommendations

Do you have any free online resources for use in freshmen level symbolic logic classes you would like to recommend?

I’m giving a talk at this years AAPT conference in Austin where people can share their recommendations for any kind of logic opencourseware. As a part of that, I’ll be promoting my version of a free online logic textbook, http://forallxremix.org/.

Do you use a free online textbook? Which one? Are there any youtube videos you like to use? Have you posted class preparations on line? Send links and recommendations to me: jloftis at lorainccc dot edu. I’m looking specifically for material that works with freshman level symbolic classes, including Aristotelian logic, sentential logic, and basic quantificational logic. I already have some resources, but need more more more! 

Untitled #1

This is the power
This is the truth of the power
This is the power of the truth of the power

See things as they are.

Paid spokesperson for a bad idea

For critical thinking classes, I want to create a series of "talking head exercises," where students have to play spokesmen for proposals that are stipulated in advance to be really bad ideas. The first scenario I thought of goes like this: There are two courses of action, and one is twice as risky as the other. Option A has a 15% chance of a Very Bad Outcome, and Option B has a 30% chance. The Payoff if the Very Bad Outcome is avoided is the same in each case. You, the student, have been hired as a TV spokesperson for Option B by an organization that for some reason (money, ideology) wants to see it happen. You need to write up a series of talking points and coaching tips to yourself for your next TV appearance.

The answer for this particular scenario would involve two bullet points:

• Emphasize  that both options have risks 
• Avoid direct quantitative comparisons. 

The spokesperson needs to say things like "Look there are no guarantees in life. Even if we took option A, there is a possibility of a Very Bad Outcome, perhaps from set of circumstances X. [Elide the fact that these circumstances are unlikely.] If we want the Payoff, we are going to take risks. All we are saying is that we should give option B a chance."

If we got really fancy, we could do role play in class, although right now I don't do any public speaking type stuff in any of my classes. It would be nice to do this in combination with studying the techniques used by people in history advocating for what we now all agree are very bad ideas, such as Bill Buckley's oh so rational arguments for segregation, or the talking points for people paid to say that cigarettes don't cause cancer.

I need more scenarios, though.

This alone provides immunization against the cavils of Dawkins-style atheists.

If you restrict yourself to beliefs that can be verified scientifically, you can't make it through your day. This alone provides immunization against the cavils of Dawkins-style atheists.

The question becomes then, what else to believe, in addition to what can be known by science. The next step that presents itself, to me at least, is to take our emotional responses to the world as at least potentially veridical. This doesn't just appear amazing, it might actually be amazing. This doesn't just appear disgusting; it is actually disgusting. We can clearly be wrong about such judgments. (When I was 17, I thought gay sex disgusting.) But we cannot be rid of all of them, or else, how do we get through our day?

Philip Pettit on Republicanism

Periodically I hear people try to explain the difference between the Republican and Democratic party in America by linking the Republican party with a tradition of republicanism that starts with the Roman Republic and goes through the founding fathers. Democrats are then linked to some dreadful rabble-rouser like Andrew Jackson. But Pettit's take on the republican tradition seems to say this this is all backwards. First of all republicanism is contrasted with classical liberalism, which the libertarian wing of the republican party claims as their ancestry. Second, Pettit's republican tradition has a strong tradition of government protection against private domination, which is really the thing that links all the elements of the current Democratic coalition together. It is the one thing that labor, women, ethnic, religious and sexual-orientation minorities all require.

In other news, if I listen to philosophy, rather than music on my run, I tend to walk more.

Pleasure and the present moment

Intense athletic training often causes the athlete to focus intensely on the present moment in a way that distorts the overall perception of time. (This is sometimes called the flow state.) Many meditation practices also get you to focus on the present moment, as does smoking dope. In cognitive science terms, you can characterize this focus as a constriction of the window of short term memory. (This at least describes the experience of smoking dope, which can create such a narrow window of short term memory that it cannot hold a longish sentence The beginning of the sentence drops out of your mind by the time you get to the end, and you forget what you are saying.)

All of these states are considered pleasant. But is it intrinsically pleasant to have your window of short term memory constricted? If there were drug that only constricted your window of short term memory, and did not have other euphoria-inducing agents, would the drug still be fun?