2-Part Blue Book Exam for Week 16
Compare a chimera that possessed you or someone you know to Akaky's chimera. Focus on the chimera's power to both elevate and crush the soul. Also compare the aftermath of the loss of the chimera.
Support your thesis with 4 paragraphs. No introduction or conclusion.
Essay #5: Final Capstone Essay for 200 Points: Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life and Gogol’s “The Overcoat”:
Option One.
Develop an argumentative thesis that compares the quest for identity in Wolff’s memoir and Gogol’s "The Overcoat." Consider maladaptation and the chimera as traps resulting from the search for identity.
Paragraph 1: Summarize "Overcoat."
Paragraph 2: Summarize This Boy's Life.
Paragraph 3: Develop a thesis about how the chimera is both a form of adaptation and maladaptation is this contradiction pertains to the short story and the memoir.
Paragraphs 4-7: Your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 8: Counterargument-rebuttal.
Paragraph 9: Conclusion
Option Two.
A wise man once said, having a chimera will kill you, but not having a chimera will also kill you. Develop an argumentative thesis that shows how this saying applies to Wolff’s memoir and Gogol’s "The Overcoat."
Use the same structure as above.
Option Three:
Compare This Boy's Life's themes of masculinity, identity, and the danger of wasting one's life with the 1993 film A Bronx Tale.
Paragraph 1: Summarize the movie.
Paragraph 2: Summarize the memoir.
Paragraph 3: For your thesis, compare toxic and stable masculinity as being expressed in the following ways:
Apollonian force of harmony, stability, and wisdom vs. Dionysian force of chaos and destruction
Self-delusion vs. recognition of personal responsibility and accountability
Free will to resist the immoral herd vs. learned helpless and determinism (having no free will but being controlled by one's upbringing and environment)
Paragraphs 4-6 Supporting the above
Paragraphs 7 and 8: Contrast major difference or differences between film and memoir.
Paragraph 9: Conclusion
Sources for Your Essay
Roger Ebert film review
New York Times film review
Option Four.
Compare and contrast the "crazy, abusive love" between Tobias' mother and Dwight in This Boy's Life with the couple in the 2007 documentary Crazy Love.
Paragraph 1: Summarize the film.
Paragraph 2: Rather than summarize the entire memoir, focus on summarizing only the dysfunctional, abusive relationship between Toby's mother and Dwight.
Paragraph 3: For your thesis, compare the notion of "crazy love" in film and memoir by focusing on the following:
demonic possession (both men are devils; in fact, Burt looks like the devil)
selfishness is the dominant force, not love
love is not evident; rather, an addictive narcotic intoxicant is
passion is one-sided, not two-sided
The women aren't looking for love; they're insanity is that they're looking for financial stability from devils.
The men's force of passion defies reality and pragmatism.
Paragraphs 4-8 support the above.
Paragraph 9: Conclusion
Sources for Your Essay
Roger Ebert film review
Slate film review
Option Five.
Develop an argumentative thesis that compares the theme of self-destructive chimera, American Dream facade, and deformed masculinity as they are evident in Wolff's memoir This Boy's Life and the 1999 film American Beauty. The idealized self can be a self-destructive chimera as we see in the following essay, which contains many parallels to Tobias Wolf as he renders himself in his memoir:
"I was hooked on meth for 11 years"
One. Tobias and the author Ed Kressy have a "me" problem. They hate who they are and feel so weighed down by self-loathing that they fantasize about being a super version of themselves. This super self is a chimera, a mirage, a sort of lie.
Two. Ed uses drugs to mask his self-loathing. Tobias disappears into a world of lies and self-aggrandizing fantasies.
Three. Both see the idealized life as never being safe enough, so they are both reckless with their lives on one hand while clinging to a more idealized version of life on the other.
Four. When you live a life of delusion and self-destruction that is obviously pathological to the casual outsider observer, you find that because you are used to such a crazy life, that this crazy life becomes your normal.
Suggested Outline:
Paragraph 1: Summarize the film American Beauty.
Paragraph 2: Summarize Tobias Wolff's memoir.
Paragraph 3: Develop a thesis that compares the chimera in both the film and the memoir.
Paragraphs 4-8 support the above.
Paragraph 9: conclusion
Grading Your Final Capstone Essay Based on SLOs:
The state of California wants to see how English 1C instructors measure their student learning outcomes (SLOs), so we submit our students' grades in addition to showing if they succeeded to meet the following 3 outcomes:
One. Students support a claim with credible sources.
Two. Students identify biases and fallacies in their opponents' views.
Three. Students use correct MLA format, paragraph composition, sentence structure, spelling, and usage.
Akaky and His Chimera
One. The overcoat has magical powers; it puts Akaky on a bipolar crazy ride. It makes him happy; he doesn’t care where he walks; he suddenly finds himself at the doorstep of his department. His life is like a giddy dream, the promise of so many ads. The Chanel No. 5 Moment has come.
Two. A brutal truth about superficial reality, materialism, and consumerism is that these things go deep into us and change who we are at our very core.
Let us repeat this: Material objects change us on the outside but they also change us on the inside. They are like placebos and we change on the inside when people treat us differently.
Three. People treat us differently because they are reacting to our new self-confidence: Whether the confidence is born from reality or delusion, it does not matter.
After AA acquires the overcoat, people become obsequious sycophants and treat him like a celebrity. When people fawn over us, we turn into the image they worship and we inevitably go insane because we lose sight of ourselves. We become the image that is worshipped. Be careful of what you wish for.
We all have an overcoat, a feature or possession that becomes our dominant form of identity and esteem.
It could be looking like a celebrity.
Living in a nice house.
Driving a European sports car.
Having a trophy relationship.
Have a jaw-dropping body.
Have over a million YouTube followers.
Once we lose our dominant feature or possession, we panic and plummet down a rabbit hole.
Four. Why does Akaky laugh at the picture of the woman baring her leg while a whiskered man espies her?
It appears the ad is a reflection of the attention Akaky is enjoying. For the first time in AA's life, he is getting his ego tickled and massaged. As a result, he has lost his innocence.
Five. Because he was so needy and desperate, Akaky could not tolerate being separated from the overcoat after it was stolen from him. You cannot let an object, or even another person, be your salvation.
You have to be whole first. Once Akaky has tasted human connection, he cannot return to his life of isolation, which he now sees for what it really is: an unbearable hell.
Another lesson from the chimera:
Six. It creates needs and a dependence that did not exist before the chimera existed in our imagination. The chimera is in part about our dependence on obsession and a lot of our obsessions are centered around security, belonging, and admiration.
Seven. Akaky without his overcoat must face the great monstrosity of the impersonal bureaucracy and this only reinforces his smallness and insignificance.
10 distinguishing characteristics of the bureaucracy.
1. It is a chimera to see the bureaucracy as a place of justice. That is not its function: The bureaucracy exists to perpetuate itself, NOT to provide competent service.
2. The bureaucracy thrives on the status quo and willfully ignores problems that might reveal deep-rooted dysfunctionality within the bureaucracy.
3. The bureaucracy thrives on petty rules and regulations while failing to provide its general mission.
4. The bureaucracy reinforces the authority, those in charge, while belittling those who come to be served by it.
5. The bureaucracy is a Giant Beast that consumes everyone associated with it: Its employees and the people is presumably serves.
6. The bureaucracy is as slow moving as an ice berg. When it needs to change course, the change is excruciatingly slow, too slow in fact.
7. Certain types of people are drawn to the bureaucracy: Small-minded, petty, mediocre, bovine people.
8. The bureaucracy is based on paper work. More paper work creates more subdivisions, which in turn create more jobs. A bureaucracy can never have enough paper work, forms, photocopies, attachments, annotations, revisions, etc.
9. Contrary to its high-minded rhetoric about morals and ethics, bureacracies can always be bribed as long as the bribe is implicit and there is an assurance of its essential clandestine nature.
10. Bureacracies embody the Peter Principle: They promote their employees to their maximum level of incompetence.
Conclusion about the Bureaucracy As It Pertains to AA:
The Overcoat humanized, uplifted, and elevated AA for the first time in his life. In contrast, the bureaucracy, head by the Very Important Person, dehumanized AA to the point of death.
Possible Essay Structure
Paragraph 1. Introduction: Profile someone who enjoyed the glory of an "overcoat" (chimera) followed by his or her demise.
Paragraph 2. Thesis with 4 or 5 mapping statements
Paragraphs 3-9: Elaborate on your mapping statements
Paragraph 10: Conclusion, a restatement of your thesis
Last page: Works Cited with no fewer than 4 sources
According to Andrea A. Lunsford in The St. Martin’s Handbook, Eight Edition, there are 20 writing errors that merit “The Top 20.”
One. Wrong word: Confusing one word for another.
Here's a list of wrong word usage.
A full-bodied red wine compliments the Pasta Pomodoro.
Compliment is a to say something nice about someone. "You look nice in that pumpkin polo shirt. Very nice pumpkin accents."
Complement is to complete or match well with something. "This full-bodied red wine complements the spaghetti."
The BMW salesman excepted my counteroffer of 55K for the sports sedan.
The word should be accepted.
Kryptonite effects Superman in such a way that he loses his powers.
Effect is a noun. Affect is a verb, so it should be the following:
Kryptonite affects Superman in a such a way that he loses his powers.
Confusing their and there
There superpowers were compromised by the Gamma rays.
We need to use the possessive plural pronoun their.
Two. Missing comma after an introductory phrase or clause
Terrified of slimy foods, Robert hid behind the restaurant’s dumpster.
In spite of my aversion to rollercoasters, I attended the carnival with my family.
Three. Incomplete documentation
Noted dietician and nutritionist Mike Manderlin observes that “Dieting is a mental illness.”
It should read:
Noted dietician and nutritionist Mike Manderlin observes that “Dieting is a mental illness” (277).
Four. Vague Pronoun Reference
Focusing on the pecs during your Monday-Wednesday-Friday workouts is a way of giving you more time to work on your quads and glutes and specializing on the way they’re used in different exercises.
Before Jennifer screamed at Brittany, she came to the conclusion that she was justified in stealing her boyfriend.
Five. Spelling (including homonyms, words that have same spelling but different meanings, which are called homographs and words that have same sound but different spelling, which are called homophones.)
No one came forward to bare witness to the crime.
No one came forward to bear witness to the crime.
Love is a disease. It’s sickness derives from its power to intoxicate and create capricious, short-term infatuation.
Its sickness derives from its power to intoxicate and create capricious, short-term infatuation.
Six. Mechanical error with a quotation
Incorrect
In his best-selling book Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure”.
Correct
In his best selling book Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure.”
Incorrect
In his best selling book Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure.” (18)
Correct
In his best selling book Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure” (18).
Incorrect
“It forever stuns me that people make life decisions based on something as fickle and capricious as love”, Michael Manderlin writes (22).
Correct
“It forever stuns me that people make life decisions based on something as fickle and capricious as love,” Michael Manderlin writes (22).
Seven. Unnecessary comma
I need to workout when at home, and while taking vacations.
You do however use a comma if the comma is between two independent clauses:
I need to workout at home, and when I go on vacations, I bring my yoga mat to hotels.
I need to workout every day, because I’m addicted to the exercise-induced dopamine.
You do however use a comma after a dependent clause beginning with because:
Because I’m addicted to exercise-induced dopamine, I need to workout everyday.
Peaches, that are green, taste hideous.
The above is an example of an independent clause with a essential information or restrictive information. Not all peaches taste hideous, only green ones. The meaning of the entire sentence needs the dependent clause so there are no commas.
However, if the clause is additional information, the clause is called nonessential or nonrestrictive, and we do use commas:
Peaches, which are on sale at Whole Foods, are my favorite fruit.
Mr. Manderlin, who is fond of shopping at the farmer's market on the weekends, had to stay in bed all day nursing a virulent abscess.
Eight. Unnecessary or missing capitalization
Some Traditional Chinese Medicines containing Ephedraremain are legal.
We only use capital letters for proper nouns, proper adjectives, first words of sentences, important words in titles, along with certain words indicating directions and family relationships.
Nine. Missing word
Incorrect
The site foreman discriminated women and promoted men with less experience.
Correct
The site foreman discriminated against women and promoted men with less experience.
Incorrect
Chris’ behavior becomes bizarre that his family asks for help.
Correct
Chris’ behavior becomes so bizarre that his family asks for help.
Ten. Faulty sentence structure
The information which high school athletes are presented with mainly includes information on what credits needed to graduate and thinking about the college which athletes are trying to play for, and apply.
A sentence that starts out with one kind of structure and then changes to another kind can confuse readers. Make sure that each sentence contains a subject and a verb, that subjects and predicates make sense together, and that comparisons have clear meanings. When you join elements (such as subjects or verb phrases) with a coordinating conjunction, make sure that the elements have parallel structures.
Incorrect
The reason I prefer yoga at home to the gym is because I prefer the privacy of home.
Correct
I prefer yoga at home to the gym because I enjoy more privacy at home than I do at the yoga studio.
Incorrect
In conclusion, it is essential that drug laws be strictly enforced in today’s society to stop criminals in their tracks and put them behind bars not just criminals but every day people who suffer from really bad addictions and who break the law in order to do their bad behavior so that we can live in a safer better society to protect the children and for all people who need to walk the streets without these kind of worries because without these kinds of strict laws our country would be in chaos and our country’s children will be the innocent victims.
The above is impossible to correct because even edited nothing is being said. Faulty sentence structure can only be edited if there is substance or real content. The above is saying nothing.
11. Missing Comma with a Nonrestrictive Element
Marina who was the president of the club was the first to speak.
The clause who was the president of the club does not affect the basic meaning of the sentence: Marina was the first to speak.
A nonrestrictive element gives information not essential to the basic meaning of the sentence. Use commas to set off a nonrestrictive element.
12. Unnecessary Shift in Verb Tense
Priya was watching the great blue heron. Then she slips and falls into the swamp.
Verbs that shift from one tense to another with no clear reason can confuse readers.
13. Missing Comma in a Compound Sentence
Incorrect
Meredith waited for Samir and her sister grew impatient.
Correct
Meredith waited for Samir, and her sister grew impatient.
Without the comma, a reader may think at first that Meredith waited for both Samir and her sister.
A compound sentence consists of two or more parts that could each stand alone as a sentence. When the parts are joined by a coordinating conjunction, use a comma before the conjunction to indicate a pause between the two thoughts.
14. Unnecessary or Missing Apostrophe (including its/it's)
Overambitious parents can be very harmful to a childs well-being.
The car is lying on it's side in the ditch. Its a white 2004 Passat.
To make a noun possessive, add either an apostrophe and an s (Ed's book) or an apostrophe alone (the boys' gym). Do not use an apostrophe in the possessive pronouns ours, yours, and hers. Useits to mean belong to it; use it's only when you mean it is or it has.
15. Fused (run-on) sentence
Klee's paintings seem simple, they are very sophisticated.
She doubted the value of medication she decided to try it once.
A fused sentence (also called a run-on) joins clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence with no punctuation or words to link them. Fused sentences must be either divided into separate sentences or joined by adding words or punctuation.
16. Comma Splice
I was strongly attracted to her, she was beautiful and funny.
We hated the meat loaf, the cafeteria served it every Friday.
A comma splice occurs when only a comma separates clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence. To correct a comma splice, you can insert a semicolon or period, connect the clauses with a word such as and or because, or restructure the sentence.
17. Lack of pronoun/antecedent agreement
Every student must provide their own uniform.
Pronouns must agree with their antecedents in gender (male or female) and in number (singular or plural). Many indefinite pronouns, such as everyone and each, are always singular. When a singular antecedent can refer to a man or woman, either rewrite the sentence to make the antecedent plural or to eliminate the pronoun, or use his or her, he or she, and so on. When antecedents are joined by or or nor, the pronoun must agree with the closer antecedent. A collection noun such as team can be either singular or plural, depending on whether the members are seen as a group or individuals.
18. Poorly Integrated Quotation
A 1970s study of what makes food appetizing "Once it became apparent that the steak was actually blue and the fries were green, some people became ill" (Schlosser 565).
Corrected
In a 1970s study about what makes food appetizing, we read, "Once it became apparent that the steak was actually blue and the fries were green, some people became ill" (Schlosser 565).
Incorrect
"Dumpster diving has serious drawbacks as a way of life" (Eighner 383). Finding edible food is especially tricky.
Corrected
"Dumpster diving has serious drawbacks as a way of life," we read in Eighner's book (383). One of the drawbacks is that finding food can be especially difficult.
Quotations should fit smoothly into the surrounding sentence structure. They should be linked clearly to the writing around them (usually with a signal phrase) rather than dropped abruptly into the writing.
19. Missing or Unnecessary Hyphen
This paper looks at fictional and real life examples.
A compound adjective modifying a noun that follows it requires a hyphen.
Corrected
This paper looks at fictional and real-life examples.
Incorrect (using hyphen for a verb)
The buyers want to fix-up the house and resell it.
A two-word verb should not be hyphenated. A compound adjective that appears before a noun needs a hyphen. However, be careful not to hyphenate two-word verbs or word groups that serve as subject complements.
Corrected
The buyers want to fix up the house and resell it.
20. Sentence Fragment
No subject
Marie Antoinette spent huge sums of money on herself and her favorites. And helped to bring on the French Revolution.
No complete verb
The aluminum boat sitting on its trailer.
Beginning with a subordinating word
We returned to the drugstore. Where we waited for our buddies.
A sentence fragment is part of a sentence that is written as if it were a complete sentence. Reading your draft out loud, backwards, sentence by sentence, will help you spot sentence fragments.
Class Exercise
In a paragraph write about a chimera you or someone you know once had.
Example
I used to know a Bakersfield man, a Paul McCartney look-alike, who was fated to live in the shadow of the great celebrity. He had the same nose, mouth, chin, ruddy jowls, sad-shaped eyes, and arched brows. He has the same hair, which he kept groomed the way McCartney did in the 1970s and 1980s, long in the back and feathered in the front.
However, Bakersfield McCartney was a tad shorter, stockier, and most noticeably had acne scars peppered on his cheeks. I first noticed him “trolling” himself at clubs, standing by himself in his black sport jacket, his “Beatles jacket,” and patiently waiting for an attractive woman to approach him and “break the ice” by commenting on how much he looked like Paul McCartney, as thousands of past successes had taught him. At clubs he would wear a stupid half-grin since his brain didn’t really have to be active in any sense as he simply used his resemblance as bait. The whole pick-up sequence must have been a rote, perfunctory affair.
Perhaps his biggest challenge was trying to show that his heart hadn’t become too calloused by this routine and that the woman fawning all over him was one of a few to make the brilliantly observant connection between him and the real Paul McCartney.
I later saw Bakersfield McCartney at my health club, where he had the same dumb half-grin on his face. His expression betrayed a certain expectancy, as if he knew it was only a matter of minutes before an attractive woman approached him and commented on his celebrity resemblance, a precursor to greater pleasures ahead.
Not surprisingly, I later found out that Bakersfield McCartney was a salesman—of cars and cell phones mostly—and that his resemblance worked to his advantage in the sales arena. All he had to do when people gawked over his resemblance to the great Beatles legend was act coy and “Ah-shucks,” and he could remain effective in the realm of sales—whether it be cars, cell phones, or, at the clubs, himself.
You could tell by looking over his life that he had no real challenges other than feigning good-natured surprise when the 99% of people he met commented on his striking resemblance to Paul McCartney. Otherwise, he was content to live in the shadows of the Liverpool crooner. Last I heard, he had never married, had never carried a long relationship, had never really put much effort in anything he did at all. He was a man content to live off a one-note gimmick and he had no shame for being so easily satisfied. Lacking any rigorous struggles to become a real person, he had become somewhat of a cipher, a hollow man with nothing to say about anything. His mind was simply full of the expectations of receiving “goodies”—accolades, sexual attention, strangers’ obsequiousness as they become elated in the presence of a mock celebrity.
His life lost its cheap glory in middle-age when his facial features distorted—bigger ears and nose, a reconfiguration of jowls and chin—so as to significantly obscure his face so that he no longer looked like the Beatles legend. With no more celebrity connection, his posse of friends and lovers abandoned him and his sales dwindled. Sullen and bitter, he moved back with his mother, a widow, where he now resides. I imagine him now introverted and chubby from a sedentary lifestyle, his bedroom cluttered with Beatles souvenirs, as he languishes in his bedroom where he daydreams of his past glory.
Similary, Akaky Akakievich from Gogol's masterpiece "The Overcoat" is a man fated to ruin after bathing in the short-lived glory of his own facade, an almost supernatural overcoat. What we see in the case of the lugubrious lookalike and equally pathetic Akaky is that to be enthralled by a chimera is to go through a journey of madness, which includes ___________, ______________, _____________, and _______________.
Lesson #5: Real and Junk Science
Critical thinking is the result of the Scientific Revolution, which has had a radical effect on human thought, culture, industry, technology, and ambition.
Scientific inquiry follows the guidelines of critical thinking.
A sad result is the junk science industry, which spreads false data for corrupt purposes.
Fraud can be difficult to detect if the data appears to come from a legit study. Second, fraud in the scientific community is rare, so people are caught off guard.
In other cases the fraud can be subtle. Levitin writes: “In other cases, an investigator changes a few data points to make the data more closely reflect his or her pet hypotheses.
Sometimes a fraud case in the science world makes international news. For example, Levitin points to Dong-Pyou Han, a biomedical scientist at Iowa State University in Ames, who was guilty of falsifying data about an HIV vaccine. He was sentenced to 5 years in prison.
The notorious hack Andrew Wakefield falsified data to make millions of people believe—and millions still believe—that measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism.
Deduction and Induction
Levitin writes: “Scientific progress depends on two kinds of reasoning. In deduction, we reason from general to specific, and if we follow the rules of logic, we can be certain of our conclusion. In induction, we take a set of observations or facts, and try to come up with a general principle that can account for them.”
Deduction Syllogism:
Example#1
Major Premise: The smartphone delivers instant dopamine and validation through its social media apps.
Minor Premise: Humans are addicted to instant dopamine and validation.
Conclusion: Therefore, humans are addicted to smartphones.
Example #2
Major Premise: People want to “have their cake and eat it too.”
Minor Premise: The Tesla, which is both sexy and environmentally friendly, allows people to have their cake and eat it too.
Conclusion: There is high demand for the Tesla.
Induction Syllogism:
Example #1
Major Premise: The smartphone delivers instant dopamine and validation through its social media apps.
Minor Premise: Humans are addicted to their smartphones.
Conclusion: Therefore, humans are addicted to instant dopamine and validation.
Example #2
Major Premise: The Tesla, which is both sexy and environmentally friendly, allows people to have their cake and eat it too.
Minor Premise: There is high demand for the Tesla.
Conclusion: People want to “have their cake and eat it too.”
Illusory Correlation
Levitin notes that “The brain is a giant pattern detector, and it seeks to extract order and structure from what often appear to be random configurations. We see Orion the Hunter in the night sky not because the stars were organized that way but because our brains can project patterns onto randomness.”
He uses the example of someone calling you and you think, “Wow, I was just thinking about calling you. What a strange coincidence.” In fact, Levitin points out, the phone call arrived amidst hundreds of random calls. There is nothing special about the timing. It was a random, but you “see” a pattern because you want to.
Astrologists make general predictions and then their followers “see” the behaviors fulfilled, but this is wishful thinking, not objective analysis.
False prophets make “prophecies” and people “see” these prophecies “fulfilled.”
Belief Perseverance
Levitin writes that “once we form a belief or accept a claim, it’s very hard for us to let go, even in the face of overwhelming evidence and scientific proof to the contrary. Research reports say we should eat a low-fat, high-carb diet and so we do. New research undermines the earlier finding—quite convincingly—yet we are reluctant to change our eating habits. Why? Because on acquiring the new information, we tend to build up internal stories to help us assimilate the knowledge.”
If we grow up believing “eating fat makes you fat,” then it’s difficult to embrace new scientific data that contradicts this claim.
Attraction Experiment
Levitin cites a famous experiment in which “participants were shown photos of members of the opposite sex while ostensibly connected to physiological monitoring equipment indicating their arousal levels.” But there was no equipment. This was a lie. Therefore, their “feedback” was false. However, when asked to choose a photo to take home with them, they didn’t choose the most attractive photo. They chose the photo that they first associated with their “feedback arousal,” even though they later learned this “feedback” was completely false.
Logical Fallacies Behind Autism Misinformation
The misinformation that vaccines cause autism is a result of illusory correlation, belief perseverance, persuasion by association, and post hoc, ergo propter hoc (because this happened after that, that must have caused this).
Between 1990 and 2010 the United States has seen a 600% increase in autism. The increase in prevalence can be attributed to three things:
One. Increased awareness of autism
Two. Widened definitions of autism
Three. Increased amount of parents who are having children later in life, which makes autism a higher risk.
Misinformation on the Internet
You will find that autism is caused by the following:
GMOs in food
Refined sugar
Childhood vaccines
Glyphosates (herbicide)
Wi-Fi
Proximity to freeways
No critical thinking or scientific inquiry is used to prove the above explanations. But people want to see a pattern where one does not exist (illusory correlation), once people believe a false explanation they cannot be persuaded by facts (belief perseverance), and people confuse correlation with causation (vaccines are given to children at the same time they are diagnosed with autism).
