Fallacies and Generalizations Essay Example for Free

Fallacies and Generalizations Essay Fallacies and generalizations of complex topics is common in today’s high-pace society. Even before the era of 24/7 news, it was often easier to persuade people to an action if the terms were simplified. Unfortunately, this simplification often mires debates, and those who have no cost to being wrong often burden others with the cost of making a wrong decision. As I have been reading Economic Facts and Fallacies (by Sowell), many of the common fallacies of today’s economics and culture situations are broken down to reveal possible causes, as well as the true causes. For today’s post, common fallacies and generalizations will be defined, as well as an example of each. When debating with others, watch out for these fallacies and call them out when you are able to. 1. Ad hominem One of the most common fallacies today, in which an argument is linked to a personal characteristic or belief to the opposition. It should not be confused with general name-calling or with legitimate concerns of the opposition’s motives for arguing. Example: Mark: Gay marriage is wrong. Susan: Well, to you it is because you are a Christian. Mark: All the reasons against have had nothing to do with religion. Susan: You are religious so it does not matter what your reasons are for not supporting gay marriage. 2. Argument from Authority Simply put, an argument/statement is correct because someone with recognized authority (person or organization) has said it is correct or endorses the position. It is commonly seen in commercials, but also prevalent in areas of debate that do rely upon factual data. Arguments based on a person’s expertise must be heavily scrutinized, especially in the scientific and mathematical fields, which require non-biased data to support conclusions in experiments. Example: â€Å"Hi, I’m (Athlete) here to talk to you about the amazing advantages of using the Dental Pro-Product Extreme! Example 2: Susan: Global Warming has not yet been conclusively proven to have been caused by human activities. Mark: 90% of scientists with the UN and many climate agencies around the world have agreed that man is the cause of this Warming. 3. Appeal to Emotion The fallacy of appealing to emotion is broad, a person can appeal to fear, ridicule, or some positive benefit. Emotion though has not place in a debate based upon facts. Example: Mark: If we don’t support our troops, then our national security is at risk! Who really wants to let up security so terrorists can sneak through and harm us? 4. Correlation does not imply Causation One of the biggest generalizations committed today is this one. Many of the fallacies in Sowell’s book revolve around this type of fallacy including various â€Å"discrimination† such as the gender-wage gap, and black-white income/education gap. The other problem with this generalization is that it generally applies broadly to a diverse group, such as â€Å"women†. Example: Mark: Women consistently earn 75 cents per dollar that men make doing the same jobs despite all the advances they have made over the years. Susan: Did you know that women, as a group, tend to choose jobs that are lower pay and have less hours? And that when compared individually, productivity differences due to time off from work explain the gap? 5. Slippery Slope The bane of many internet debates and political debates is the slippery slope fallacy. It is often combined with other fallacies to make the argument stronger. In essence, the person will use this fallacy to say that a small event will cascade into ever larger events, typically against the wishes of the audience. Susan: If we legalize prostitution, then drug use will increase. Which means more tax dollars will be needed to combat the rise in crime that will result, and schools will need to enforce stricter drug policies to protect children. Mark: Why not legalize drugs as well? Shouldn’t people be free to use their bodies as they please? Many, many, infinitely many more fallacies exist. Generalizations are also common when people are treated as a homogeneous group, such as the income differences amongst ethnic groups in the United States. Of course, at times fallacies and generalizations can be useful, if they are true and conform to reason, but for every-day usage, most are just to win the debate and shame the opponent one way or another.

Germany :: essays research papers

Germany is located in Central Europe. It borders the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. It is between the Netherlands and Poland, south of Denmark. It is slightly smaller than Montana.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Germany’s economy was the world’s third most powerful in 1997. The German economy benefited from robust exports, particularly to other members of the EU and the US, as well as strengthening equipment investments. But anemic private consumption and contraction in the construction industry limited the expansion. Unemployment continued to set post-war monthly records through the end of 1997 and averaged 4.3 million for the year. In preparation for the first of January 1999, the start of the European Monetary Union, the government has made major efforts in 1996-97 to reduce the fiscal deficit. This effort has been complicated by growing unemployment, an erosion of the tax base, and the continuing transfer of roughly $100 billion a year to eastern Germany to refurbish this ex-communist area. In recent years business and political leaders have become increasingly concerned about Germany’s decline in attractiveness as an investment target. They cite increasing preference by German companies to locate new manufacturing facilities in foreign countries rather than in Germany, to be closer to the markets, and to avoid Germany’s high tax rates, high wage cost, rigid labor structures, and extensive regulations. For similar reasons foreign investment in Germany has been lagging for years.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Germany is one of the world’s leading industrial nations. Western Germany is among the world’s largest and technologically advanced producers of iron, steel, coal, cement, chemicals, machinery, vehicles, machine tools, and electronics. Eastern Germany’s industries are metal fabrication, chemicals, brown coal, shipbuilding, machine building, textiles, and petroleum refining. Industry employs around 41 percent of the German work force. Germany’s biggest industry is vehicles because of luxury cars such as the BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Porsche, but you can’t forget the VW Beetle.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  German exports value at 521.1 billion dollars. Manufacturing, such as machines and machine tools, chemicals, motor vehicles, and iron and steel products, totals over 88 percent of all exports. Agricultural products account for 5 percent, raw materials for a little over 2 percent, and fuels as 1 percent. Other non-mentioned products total about 3 and a half percent.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  German imports value at 455.7 billion dollars. manufactured items are also the most imported at a little over 74 percent of all imports. Agricultural products equal around 10 percent, fuels are over 6 percent, and raw materials are almost 6 percent. Other non-mentioned materials are under 4 percent of the total imports.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The labor force is roughly 38.7 million people. As said earlier industry employs around 41 percent, agriculture employs 3 percent, and services employ

Family Honor

Family honor is romeo and juliet is represented by the constant attempts to preserve family pride from both houses. This defense and pride causes many deaths and deeper problems that are passed down from generation to generation. In the first scene of romeo and juliet, the montagues and capulets come across each other, and because of the deep rooted hatred they have for each other's fmilies, they taunt one another and begin to fight. This fight worsens the already tarnished relationship the two houses share. Tybalt, a capulet, holds a strong place in defending his family's honor. It is so strong that he even enjoys it. Like Tybalt, the Montegues are fueled by their hatred for one another. What they don't realize is that this hatred only challenges each other's family honor. Family honor is not always such a negative thing. This can similarly occur outside fiction as well. In my family, there has been little representation of family honor. For example, moving around at such a high rate, we have been unable to develop feuds with other families. There were bits of family honor in my life. At school I was against telling anyone details about what was going on in my home life in an attempt to protect and defend my family's honor. This often was unsuccessful. Though, the type of family honor show in my life differed from the family honor shown in Romeo and Juliet. All in all, there is a distinct representation of famly honor in Romeo and juliet. This honor can also be shown in real life. This completely depends on the family and what family honor means to them. For me, family honor is not a huge factor in my life. This does not mean I do not have family pride. I cannot relate much to romeo and juliet.

Hotel Industry

Introduction In the Introduction I have researched a given division of the Hotel area In Kolkata i. e. extravagance storing up of Hotels. The paper settled on the present Macro Business in India and its connection to the friendliness business. The focuses are as runs with:- Macro Environment may be depicted as the major outside and uncontrollable segments that impacts a conglomeration's choice settling on and effects its choice making and approach. PESTEL) Political, Social, Economical, Technological, Environmental, Legal investigation of Luxury Collection of Hotels. Evaluation of PESTEL examination Negative and Positive Aspects. Main Body †¢Political issues that happen for the abundance lodgings are the strikes that happen consistently. The clients are hesitant to visit and thusly drop reservations and lodgings run on occurrences. The foundations of certain structures are also an issue on the grounds that the promoters does not contemplate further frameworks as bids hail from t op power.Thusly structures are not made and the zone moves to working in the direction of inching toward getting pummeled decimating occupations of different individuals. †¢The Economical issues may be the sponsorship imperfections made watching the reach now clients starting from outside in particular complete visitors they need to stay in a wealth lodge that is composed close-by shade and in a spot where the street unite with the generally speaking city.For instance let's take a river side hotel which is situated in Kolkata as an example, the separation is essentially far at a partition from the runway or to the suburbs to the city so standard if the visitor has a get-as one kept inside the city he should leave early by a hour or two to finish the specific terminus on time which winds up being essentially a nervousness. Yet for a uxury hotel, it is essentially coordinated amidst the shed and the city so its much supportive for the visitor to stay in an important indulgence ke eping up which at the same focus is moreover segregated at a partitioning from every spot of the confusion which about bargains to manage generous situations. †¢The Social issues may be impeccable for an occasion completion of the line for the most part social occasions as it moreover incorporates I. T. arts and where there is a touch of progress individuals can furthermore encounter the certain underpinnings as the city Kolkata incorporates academic castles case in point British space offices and Queen Elizabeth's Victoria Memorial. So clients can encounter both forward and bona fide being. As the city is not rural based hence it has appositive impact. Here the customers can like both expert and private necessities. Summation:- The report thoroughly recognizes the PESTEL examination and its unavoidable finishes influence on the client cooperation.What are the various meanders being undertaken and what are the notable things and its suspected organize beginning from the foundat ion till the prodding position. How the whole cordiality business influences the business redesign as an entire degree that Macro Environment determining the budgetary and the political issues as the central issue. At whatever time its all stated and done the examination insists if the steps taken are gainful or setback acknowledged.

How to Make a College PowerPoint Presentation

How to Make a College PowerPoint Presentation As it is generally known and accepted, visualization of expressed thoughts makes perception and understanding an easier process. Microsoft PowerPoint is the software designed specifically for this purpose, by creating and demonstrating multimedia presentations. If you have not yet downloaded PowerPoint to your computer, you should buy this software in the nearest future and do so. It will come in handy. If you do not know how to use the software for creating presentations, you may find many tutorials devoted to this subject online. PowerPoint gives you opportunities to incorporate your voice presentation with images, tables, diagrams, and charts. You may also use multimedia presentations to demonstrate your academic work results and research paper or case study findings, as well as create presentations for informal meetings or events and summarize pieces of work via PowerPoint presentations, etc. When using the animated presentation creation feature, you are to follow several simple rules. Your foremost task is getting the message across to the audience by helping them visual it. Unfortunately, sometimes PowerPoint presentations prevent the viewers from understanding the speaker’s message due to excessive visual and sound effects. In order to make your point clear and obvious, you should minimize distractions in your presentations. First of all, you should carefully select the statements and sentences appearing on the screen. They should not be too short or too long, but still should convey your point of view. Also, using one sentence per slide is recommended and each slide should address a certain concept. With the help of Microsoft PowerPoint, you will add animation, color schemes, looks and feels, accompanying sound, and even video-clips to the material you are presenting. However, the overshoot of these effects will not add to your work. Try to be brief and precise and make the thoughts clear and easy-to-read. Secondly, you are to state the number of slides you will use. This decision depends on the type of written assignment you are presenting. If it is a short journal article, five slides will be enough in most cases. In the event you have a serious case study, it would be better to extend the number of slides to 13-15, etc. Additionally, all the slides should be united with one as well as the color scheme. Bear in mind; however, that focusing on the information presented via audio and visual channels for a long time may be complicated for the audience. You need to â€Å"know your audience† and anticipate when they may become tired and stop listening to you. Remember, Power Point is designed to assist with transmitting messages, so use the tool effectively. You can order a custom PowerPoint presentation for your college classes at CustomWritings.com writing company now!

How to avoid procrastinating and get writing - Emphasis

How to avoid procrastinating and get writing How to avoid procrastinating and get writing Remember last year: the pain of putting off that report day after day, finally bashing it out in a blind panic the night before it was due? Not only does this leave you a stress-addled mess, but it means your cobbled-together work wont represent the best you can actually do. It could even mean you miss out on business you really should have won. Why do we procrastinate? We procrastinate for several reasons. Feeling overwhelmed by the size of a project; feeling out of your depth; fear of failure (or even of success); perfectionism; other tasks distracting you: these may all be to blame. Ultimately, as Mark Forster points out in Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management, each of these reasons stems from our reactive mind viewing whatever it is we have to do as a threat (risking failure etc). By avoiding the work, we avoid the danger. Only temporarily of course. In reality, we all know that eventually we will be in a worse position. Stop the putting-off cycle These tricks can help you start as you mean to go on (willpower required): Lie to yourself. Procrastinators are practised self-deceivers (Ill just spend five minutes on Facebook; Ill get up at 5am tomorrow to get started; Im sure I can write the whole thing in one day). Put this skill to good use. Mark Forster recommends lying to ones own reactive brain to stop it from feeling threatened. Tell yourself: I wont start the proposal now; Ill just get out the brief. With the reactive mind thus comforted, you may find yourself carrying on without even realising. If not, just keep adjusting the lie to take you a bit further each time: I wont start writing yet; Ill just make a few notes Ill just make a spidergram of ideas and so on. Little and often. Set a time to start and stick to it. Then work in timed chunks start small if need be (say, ten or fifteen minutes) and work up. Youll find an amount of time thats best for you, but dont exceed an hour. Again, to break through panic, try telling yourself youll just work for five or ten minutes. Once those minutes have passed, youll probably be in your stride already. If not, take two or three minutes off, and start again. Increase each work session by a few minutes. Take breaks. When the time is up for one session, stop even if you are mid-sentence. Knowing a break is coming can perk you up; taking the break allows you to re-focus, letting you come back refreshed and more productive than if you drag on for hours at a time. A quick change of scene even a good stretch can do wonders here. Set goals, but keep them realistic. A daily to-do list is best theres nothing like ticking off completed items (however seemingly small) for keeping you motivated to carry on. Of course, most resolutions are fated to be thrown out after a single slip-up. But to give in to discouragement after one lost day and start procrastinating all over again would be the equivalent of giving in to one slice of cheesecake, then despairingly deciding you may as well eat everything in the fridge. Youre left feeling queasy, angry and with considerably less to show for it. You deserve better.

Good Ethics in Good Business Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Good Ethics in Good Business - Assignment Example There are conflicting studies regarding the link between good ethics and profitability in the short term, however, it does appear that good ethics can help a company achieve a strong long-term business model. Conversely, in the cases of Enron, Parmalat, and Merrill Lynch for example, a business ethics-related scandal can cost billions of dollars and even the destroy a company. Empirically, ethics or the lack thereof, can be a wild-card factor that can either improve or cost a business. More or less, good ethics serve as an insurance policy against corporate implosion and can help establish long-term customer and employee loyalty. In today's business culture, however, profitability is still the trump card, even amongst a trend toward greater corporate social responsibility. To understand what good ethics are, a clear definition of ethics must be made. The reality is that among others, there are two major separate and at times, conflicting paradigms regarding a preferred business model. The prevailing model in modern business, an open-market model, relies philosophically on Adam Smith's lassiez faire approach, that unadulterated market competition will always yield the most effective results. In theory, a pure open market system abhors any form of market interference, as it will only work counter to the maximization of an economic system. On a practical level, this type of competition finds its way into the investment markets. Large corporations are constantly under pressure to showcase their value in the form of stock prices, earnings reports, and prognoses for increased profitability in the near future. It would be considered unethical in this model to interfere with the natural conduct of business. Advocates of this model are by nature, against regul ation. The other model, which focuses on corporate social responsibility, is a more holistic approach that includes the social consequence of a company beyond its shareholder obligations. Therefore, good ethics are measured by the benefit to all entities that come in contact with a company directly or indirectly, from shareholders, to customers, to employees, to subcontractors, and to the environment. This type of model, which has been recently adopted by the United Nations, is challenging the traditional bottom-line approach and redefining the meaning of good ethics in business. The open market model has been the prevailing model of big business since roughly 1980, following international economic turmoil, believed to have been caused by an over-regulating economic philosophy from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Deregulation, desperation, and temptation have invited many ethics scandals in recent memory, from European scandals in the 1980' and 1990's to the U.S. based global corporate scandals in the early 21st Century. Lloyds of London for example, one of the largest insurances providers in the world, narrowly avoided bankruptcy as a result of allegedly misrepresenting its profitability and the amount of liabilities in the early 1980's to its Names, or wealthy individuals who underwrite their policies. The scandal led to over $8 billion in losses as it rocked London's financial markets, and as Tony Blair claimed, "Lloyd's has committed the largest, most extensive and pervasive fraud in history (McClilntick, 2000)." Another large European company, Parmalat , has been accused