Thursday, July 23, 2009
I'll do it! Just don't scare me any more!
How many emails have been received in ALL CAPS telling us some scary thing or another? Skepchick has a nice exposition of the anatomy of one of these crap emails regarding cancer. The rhetorical devices used are found in many emails of this vein, and I think a little awareness of these devices can go a long way to raising our critical hackles in similar messages.
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SO TRUE. I get so many emails warning me of one thing or another, and I usually roll my eyes after reading the subject line--before I've even delved into the farcical message. I used to look up the content on snopes and forward the link to the sender to show them that they're spreading false claims, but I get so many that I've just gotten apathetic about it and just delete them without even reading. The funny thing is that that cancer message, in my oppinion, isn't as false as skepchick would have us believe. I've read material in book form about what she was criticizing and it makes a lot of sense to me, but that's just me. On a separate note, do you know people that ALWAYS type in caps? That drives me crazy. Stop screaming at me!
ReplyDelete@Veronica:
ReplyDeleteWhich part of that cancer email do you think isn't so false?
LOL--I have to admit I only skimmed over her post and a few things I saw reminded me of a book I read that talked about how cancer forms, which is when isopropyl alcohol & sugar combines in your body or something insane like that. The book went on to describe how to keep from getting cancer which is basically IMPOSSIBLE b/c you can't eat anything with sugar in it, and isopropyl alcohol is apparently in most processed foods and in all the soaps we use. The book had recipes on how to make your own soap, for goodness sake, so I'm like, yeah, I guess I'll just live my life and if cancer happens, it happens. Anyway, back to that article, when I saw that sugar was listed as something that fed cancer cells, I think that's what I was thinking made sense but now not so much. Obviously sugar isn't an ideal thing to be putting in your body but I don't know if it actually feeds cancer cells! I just spoke too soon without really properly reading the article.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure to what book you are referring, but I'm fairly certain that cancer is not simply the result of two chemicals reacting in the body. (For a starting place on cancer information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer; there are links to many good references there.)
ReplyDeleteYou have, however, reminded me of something I've been meaning to write about: appeal to authority as a logical fallacy. A common misconception seems to be that if information is in a book, it must be accurate/true. To see part of the problem consider your favorite special interest group you love to hate. Do you trust what they say? If they have the money to have a book published, would you trust its contents?
With the internet it is even easier for someone to "publish" whatever garbage comes to mind. This blog, as I continue to spew nonsense, will be an excellent example of that.