Why Your Argument Won't Work on Me

            Today we will be discussing arguments and why they never seem to convince anyone to change their point of view, no matter how soundly organized and well delivered they may be. First we will need to make a little detour. I invite you to join me as we take a walk in the shoes of Officer Taylor. We will then use his story to see why your arguments likely won’t work on me.

Officer Taylor is 38-year-old man with a wife and two kids and a father battling cancer. He has been with the Springfield Police Department for 7 years now, and despite being completely fictional, has a rich history of travels and volunteer work. Assuming that you are an average person, it stands to reason that this day last year was a typical day for you. For Officer Taylor, however, that day was anything but typical. He usually worked in the afternoons, but traded with a colleague for the morning shift that day, due to a prior obligation. So at quarter to six, Officer Taylor kissed his wife goodbye and headed off to the station.

There wasn’t much traffic that day, but it seemed Officer Taylor would still be late to work. Just two blocks from the station he noticed a small crowd outside of a building. He slowed down to see what was going on and noticed a man standing on the ledge. Officer Taylor pulled over and quickly ran over to the crowd. He told one of the bystanders to call 911 before attempting to talk the man down. He told the man that life was worth living no matter how bad things seem now, but unfortunately, it seemed that nothing could convince the man. He had just lost his wife in a car accident while he was driving, and blamed himself for her death. He felt that this was the only way he could make things right and insisted that no one try to save him. With that, the man closed his eyes and took a step forward. Officer Taylor immediately jumped into action. He ran over to the man and began performing CPR until paramedics arrived. Officer Taylor wouldn’t find out for another week, but he actually saved that man’s life.

When he finally did arrive at work, he was given the option to take the rest of the day off after what he just went through, but he insisted that working would help keep his mind occupied. Officer Taylor would later come to regret that decision though. Not even an hour later a call came in about a religious cult performing animal sacrifices in the woods behind a community park. Officer Taylor and a couple other officers arrived on the scene and began questioning cult leader. He informed them that he had received a divine calling from God to lead a group of followers down the true path to salvation. A path that requires sacrifice, and not just from local livestock. It seems that Officer Taylor and his team were too late, as the entire group had just ingested poison and were minutes away from death. The officers tried to save anyone they could, but nothing more could be done for the members at this point. After the lengthy paperwork was completed, Officer Taylor resigned to issuing a few routine speeding citations before clocking out for the day.

After leaving the station, Officer Taylor made a quick stop at a nearby sandwich shop to pick up a Reuben, his father’s favorite. He then made his way to the hospital. He entered through the parking garage, made the usual left down the long hallway, walked up the three flights of stairs, and passed by the nurse’s station on his way to his father’s room. His father was lying in bed when he walked in, but got straight up to hug his son. The two sat down so Mr. Taylor could eat his sandwich, and talked about the weather, how well the kids were doing in school, and how Mrs. Taylor just got a promotion at the university where she worked. Officer Taylor, didn’t tell his father about the day he had at work that morning, about the awful things he witnessed. When asked, he said it was just another day on the job.

They talked for about an hour before the doctor finally came into the room. Then they both got really quiet. They both knew what was about to happen, but nothing could have truly prepared them for it. The doctor sat down with the two of them and explained the process. He handed Mr. Taylor a few forms to fill out, and wished them both the best of luck. Kind of an ironic thing to say given the situation, but somehow it seemed appropriate.

When Officer Taylor returned home that evening he didn’t say much. He didn’t talk about his day at work, or about visiting his father. He didn’t ask his daughter about how well she did on her spelling test, or ask his wife if she had remembered to finally get her oil changed a thousand miles past due. He just sort of sat around the house. He wasn’t sad or angry, he was barely even present. His wife prepared dinner, but Officer Taylor didn’t eat much. He sat there moving his food around for a few minutes before excusing himself from the table and heading off to the bedroom. He knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep that night, although around three in the morning he did finally start to drift in and out of sleep.

If you are an average person it stands to reason that today was a typical day for you. For Officer Taylor, however, today was the anniversary of the day that his father decided to stop battling cancer. He opted for an assisted suicide and wanted his son to be with him in his last few hours. For Officer Taylor, today was anything but typical.

If you’re still with me, I hope you enjoyed Officer Taylor’s story, and you must certainly be wondering how any of this pertains to the topic I originally introduced. The problem with all arguments, you see, is that they require the recipient to share a common understanding with the person delivering the argument in order to be persuaded. For example, the man in the story that committed suicide saw no value in life. Since the man and officer did not have a common understanding of the value of life, the officer was unable to construct an argument on this basis that would persuade the man.

From a completely nonbiased viewpoint, it would seem that no belief is true and that everything is based around an individual’s understanding of the world. Any argument then, is just an attempt to alter someone else’s understanding to closer align with your own, yet we all feel so compelled to make these arguments anyway. Even with regards to your own person, people often cannot help but to interject their own beliefs. For instance, the man who wanted only to be left to die was saved against his will. Persuading others is innate for most of us, yet if we wish to be successful we need to start framing our arguments to the beliefs of the other person.

Where does this break down? Religion. The story saw a religious belief driving an entire group to mass suicide. The story was, of course, fictitious, but that does not mean that there are not plenty of real life examples of religious extremists taking drastic action in the name of their faith. The problem with religion is that it is not based on logic, it is based on faith. The shared understanding between the two people, then, must be this particular faith rather than an evidence based belief. All arguments become essentially void in the face of “God works in mysterious ways.”

One more point about arguments that we can learn from Officer Taylor, is that they are context based. We can say that life is worth living to a suicidal man, but an old man suffering deserves mercy. So, while you are creating your personalized arguments, remember to also consider the context of the other person’s situation, because there is a good chance that you have never been through some of the things that they have. Before you can hope to have someone else share your point of view, you must first understand theirs.

-AMS

So You Can Cook Meth, Doesn't Mean You're a Chemist

            A reference to Breaking Bad, huh, I see where this is going. That’s right. We’re talking about teachers today. This actually applies to many professions, but teachers are one of the most pronounced examples. Let me set the scene. You are a meth cook who has proven a nuisance to your boss. Being the best meth cook around, you assume your safe, after all who would cook the meth if not you. However, it seems that a coworker has learned your method from watching you. Fearing for your job and your life, this is the meth business after all, you begin to explain the complex nuances to the chemistry of meth production that this amateur cook could never even begin to understand. Your boss lets you keep your job, murders the other guy, and everything is right with the world. That’s how it happened on television anyway.

            Anyone who actually watched the show knows, maybe the boss should have gone with the first guy. But why not? I mean it’s just a process of mixing, heating, extracting, etc. With some practice, anyone could make a high-quality product, as long as they follow the proven recipe to a T. Well, what happens when conditions change. Maybe that proven recipe isn’t applicable anymore. Maybe the DEA has caught on and put a mass restriction on one of your core ingredients. What can you substitute? Maybe you had to move to a new lab that has poor ventilation, how will you compensate? You might be able to follow an established recipe and cook meth with the best of them, but that doesn’t mean you have the base of knowledge that an actual chemist would. Your skills begin and end with that one recipe under a constant set of conditions.

            I thought you said we were going to talk about teachers?

It’s a metaphor okay? I’m getting there. First I will make a small detour and talk about pilots. You see pilots have a unique set of skills that most other people do not have. The ability to put a 450-ton steel contraption 3,900 ft. in the air and then bring it back down safely on the other side of the planet. Ask your average Joe if he thinks he could do the same with no training, and he would tell you of course not. He’s not a pilot, and thus does not know how to fly a plane. Ask him to teach thirty 9-year-olds to read, however, and you might get a different response.

This same guy that was not a pilot, is also not a teacher, yet, for some reason so many people believe that anyone who knows how to read can teach others to do the same. What’s the only job you can get with a fourth-grade education? Teaching third-grade. This is another example of the meth cook trying to be a chemist though. The man would, of course make better progress teaching reading than flying a plane, since the man himself knows how to read, but does not know anything about aviation. However, pit him against a trained, seasoned teacher, and the differences become very readily apparent. Can the man differentiate between upwards of six different grade levels? And that’s just in a first-grade class. What if one of the children is autistic, or an immigrant with limited English. Perhaps one child is deaf. Does the man know the most current best practices for teaching reading? Of course not. Should the children be grouped within their skill level, or low with high. Does the man even know to break the class up into groups, because no teacher in their right mind would do whole group only reading instruction anymore.

            So the next time you hear about new math and think, that’s not how you should teach math, you might as well be telling your doctor that this new procedure isn’t how you should be treating illness, because bloodletting was much simpler and worked just as well. Rest assured, that these are evidence based practices that are specifically developed to address the issues that plagued older methods. So even though you might not understand it, your children will soon be doing math circles around you, then subsequently analyzing those circles to postulate new applications of pi. For those of you who may not buy into what I am saying, keep smurfing pseudo while the real chemists put you out of business.

            -AMS

Just Because They Are Your Kids, Doesn't Mean They're Yours

            Today we are going to be talking about vaccines. With all of the controversy surrounding the safety and efficacy of vaccines it can be difficult to decide whether or not to vaccinate your child. Well the simple answer is… yes. You should certainly vaccinate your child with every vaccine recommended under all circumstances short of a specific condition which deems that vaccine unsafe for your particular child. I am not even going to pretend like there is a valid counter argument here. Vaccines prevent horrible diseases, have few side effects, have little to no evidence of long term health risks, and are in almost every case free. If your uninsured and cannot afford the vaccine the United States government will give it to your child for free because they are that important. So, in summary, don’t be ignorant, vaccinate your child, the end, right? Well, not quite. We’re only one paragraph in and what I have written so far isn’t even relevant to the title.

            So, where’s the controversy? Let’s review my rule for legislation. Let them do what they want as long as it can’t harm others. So, if you don’t want to go to the doctor when you are sick I won’t make you. If you don’t want to take your medicine when you are sick, I won’t make you. If you don’t want to get an adult vaccine that could prevent you from contracting a horrible disease, I won’t make you. The key word in all of those statements was you. Your children on the other hand, are not you, nor are they your property. Say, that title is finally starting to make sense. Should vaccines be mandatory for children? Yes. Should parents be able to opt their children out of immunization because of personal or spiritual beliefs? No. Is this infringing on their freedoms? No, because again, your children are not you.

            While children are the responsibility of their parents, they are still their own humans, and that needs to be respected. Now that doesn’t mean that children should be autonomous. I think anyone who has spent any time with a child can attest to the fact that they are not mature enough to make decisions that are in their own best interest. Left to their own devices, I’m sure most kids would live off of a diet of ice cream and gummy bears. If you have ever tried to give a child medicine, you also know that, were it up to them, they probably wouldn’t take it, yet it is your responsibility as a parent, to act in the child’s best interest, even if it means doing something that they would vote against.

What is in a child’s best interest, is of course subjective. If a child wanted to learn piano and then decided it was too hard after a few lessons and now wanted to quit, should the parent force them to stick with it to teach them patience and hard work, or let the child pursue other avenues to find their real passion. The key difference here is that, to my knowledge, no child has ever contracted polio from their inability to perform Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

            Forcing parents to parent in a certain manner is obviously a slippery slope, and parents certainly won’t accept that anyone knows better how to raise their child than them, but immunizations are not as controversial as you might think. While scary stories might still persist about the redacted autism link, or even other unrelated risks that parents tell each other around the campfire, vaccines are very well studied, and the evidence and general consensus among medical experts all suggest that the benefits of immunizing your children far outweigh any potential risks. And it is in these such cases, where the evidence is there, that parents should be forced to act in the best interest of their child, regardless of their personal beliefs. To not do so would be, in my opinion, child abuse, something most all of us can agree is bad.

            -AMS

Back Then, We Could Just Go Buy Guns

            As I mentioned before, the debate over gun control stems from a dissidence between protecting the rights of an individual to do as they please, and protecting others from harm. Legislation meant to remedy this situation is typically aimed at allowing individuals to own guns, but restricting which guns can be purchased and the prerequisites for such an individual to purchase a gun. Superficially, these seem like great ideas, but they fall apart in practice. All guns are deadly. Sure, banning assault rifles seems like common sense to some, but a simple pistol can kill all the same. As for the background checks, that only stops the repeat offender, and that is still only if they cannot find a loophole to exploit or a way around the check. The problem with gun control is that it truly does a poor job of deferring gun violence while simultaneously justifying the right to gun ownership.

            The claim that everyone always defers to when defending gun ownership in the United States is the second amendment to the constitution which bars legislators from infringing on the rights of citizens to keep and bear arms. I mean it was the second rule ever put in place by the founders of the country, who could ever oppose such a thing. The answer, if you hadn’t already guessed, is me. People view gun legislation as needing to dance around this amendment, as if it were just absolute truth, and the idea of ever repealing it was ludicrous. I ask, what would honestly be so bad about a world in which people couldn’t just go out and buy guns? Obviously, there are a lot of arguments to address, so let’s begin.

            What does the law actually say? If you’ve ever wondered why courts have spent so much time debating about what the writers intended when they wrote the law, it is because this is all they wrote: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The key word here is militia. Militia refers to armed forces of the civilian population as opposed to a formal military. The definition then splits to refer to either, a supplemental force to back an established military, or a rebellious force to oppose an established military. Regardless of which definition you use, the law makes sense for a newly formed, 18^th century nation. In today’s context, however, neither scenario has any real practicality.

            The budget of the United States military is currently in the hundreds of billions range. At its disposal are fleets of tanks, jets, and ships. If needed, missiles can be launched abroad. Its honestly surprising that human soldiers are even still a thing. I cannot imagine any circumstances in which the deciding factor in an international altercation is going to be a well regulated militia.

            Okay so we have this superpower, supposedly fighting in our best interest. What if this power loses sight of the public interest and we are tossed into a dystopian militant state? Well then of course we will need that well regulated militia to rebel against the forces that be, and to reclaim the freedom that this country was built on. Right? Of course, all of those resources I mentioned earlier are still present, and now they are aimed at you and your closet of firearms that the writers guaranteed you the rights too. Let’s just say the odds are not in your favor.

            So why do so many continue to argue that guns are a necessity. Well, I have a right to defend myself and my family don’t I. Of course you do, and what better way to keep them safe than to remove gun access from those that might want to hurt them. The same argument is always presented in response to gun protection. If you outlaw guns, you remove guns from the law-abiding citizens and give exclusive access to the criminals, leaving everyone else defenseless.

Let me point out the biggest fallacy with this school of thought. Marijuana is illegal, yet I guarantee I could get my hands on some by the end of the day if my life depended on it. So why is it still so widely available? Simple, it’s a plant. All you need are some seeds and a suitable environment and you have marijuana. Guns, on the other hand, are complex mechanical devices that require a lot of precision in their manufacturing. If the production of firearms were illegalized, criminals would be left with the option of making their own or illegally importing them from outside of the country. I am going to guess that the vast majority of criminals could not manufacture their own gun if you held a gun to their head.

As for importing, take a guess which is harder to sneak passed customs, a bag of drugs or a metal firearm. What about Mexico? Where do you think all of their guns come from? Firearm production in Mexico is incredibly limited. Its far easier to sneak them in from the United States where anyone can just buy them, than to obtain them from within the country. The criminals who would have guns then, wouldn’t be the ones breaking into neighborhood homes to pilfer. They would be the high level, resourceful criminals, who most likely don’t really care about you or your family.

So, take a moment to really consider the following question. Do you honestly think your family is safer when anyone and everyone can go purchase a gun and decide they want to shoot one of your loved ones? Even if you did have a gun in your home, you maybe could have gotten to it in time, and maybe could have fended the assailant off with it.

That brings us to the last, and surprisingly most convincing argument for gun ownership, hunting. While I am personally not a big fan of hunting, I do not entirely object to its practice, as long as it is done for food and not sport. Short of taking up a nonanimal based diet, hunting is often one of the most humane forms of acquiring meat. In terms hunting deer and similar game, it is also without a suitable alternative to gun use. In the most black and white context, I would have to say that I would side with the complete illegalization of firearm production regardless of intended use, simply due to the associated risk far outweighing the justifiable merit.

In summary, guns are dangerous and all but useless in the present day United States. Their obsoletion has been long coming and it is time to start taking action. The process will undoubtedly be long and rife with errors, but the end result would be well worth the efforts. Looking back at life 50 years ago from our modern prospective, we are shocked at the ignorance of a society that let children play with mercury. My aspiration is that we will have a future that looks back on us in shock, where schoolchildren will read about the turbulent times when people could just go buy guns and ask their teacher in disbelief, how we could have been so stupid.

-AMS