This has the potential to be contentious, so let's try to keep it really seemly and we'll be fine.
I see lots of students in here who are clearly able to display critical skills when discussing literature, and I'd like to put forward a plea for those same students to use those same critical skills in everyday life.
I see far too many people sucked into obvious frauds, urban legends and general silliness that could easily be avoided if a few simple thinking skills were operated first. There are some really simple ones to start off with:
"Too good to be true." Says it all. Once every thousand years or so, someone does give away money, just because they like you! The rest of the time, they don't. Nobody in Nigeria actually wants to give you $US10,000,000 and that pyramid game your friend made $30k from is illegal.
"Is this real?" This is best applied to things like e mails, news from friends, anything where something is unusual. I couldn't count the number of urban legends I've had passed to me during my life, but it would be thousands by now. Some of them are highly cunning and some have been around for centuries. These can be all sorts of things - from means of contracting AIDS to treatments for cancer and impotence, to pleas for help by allegedly sick children. Most of these are so old and boring that I've seen them several times. Even ones which seem to do no harm - one I received last week, from my boy's rugby club - can be dangerous. The club forwarded an official e mail to all parents, warning of the dangers of drug dealers giving away crystal methamphetamine-laced lollies to kids and asking parents and kids to be on guard.
Now, how can that be harmful, you ask? Surely that e mail raises awareness of drug abuse, which is good?
Alas, that would be completely incorrect.
The e mail contained information that both NZ Police and hospitals were aware of this process and that "several children" had been hospitalised.
Fortunately, I knew that the police had no knowledge of such things happening and I knew that crystal methamphetamine is virtually harmless if taken orally and I quickly found out that no kids has been treated at NZ hospitals for crystal methamphetamine ingestion. I also knew that drug dealers just don't work like that. I obtained evidence to confirm what I said and explained all this to the chairman of the club, whose decision it was to forward the misinformation.
To understand why this sort of thing is dangerous, I drew an example for him.
Imagine you're a father and you want to discuss drugs with your child.
You start off by pointing out the dangers of drug abuse.
You show pictures of people with teeth rotting from meth smoking.
You tell them to watch out for drug dealers in the playground and that lollies could really be drugs.
You tell them that marijuana is a gateway drug.
At a later stage, your child meets up with someone who is an actual drug user. That person has a job and uses drugs recreationally, has no rotting teeth and generally appears quite normal. All of a sudden, lots of what you've told your child has been blown away as cheap rhetoric.
The child wonders, "If all those things I've been told aren't true, then maybe the whole drugs are bad thing is over-rated and I should give it a try!"
Kids are best off when given the truth at all times. There is no upside in telling them lies and no downside in telling them the truth.
Take homeopathy. Lots of people swear by it. Those people are clearly unaware of the "placebo effect", a well-known and well-documented medical process where people think they feel better, simply because they expect to. Now, without causing too much argument, I'd like people to realise that homeopathy isn't just a lie, it's an absurd lie. The premise is absurd - that water somehow "remembers" a molecular formula and "copies" it so that the water carries the same benefit as the original medicine. Anyone with even the most basic cheistry knowledge is able to tell you that water can only be broken down into two things - oxygen and hydrogen. Those atoms can't change and they most certainly cannot remember anything.
I'm not going to mention religion too much, because that's a very much personal choice kind of thing, but if you choose to join a religion, don't join one which blatantly lies to you. For instance, religions which state that the earth is 6000 years old are just plain wrong. There is no evidence at all to back that up, while there are literally thousands of different means of ageing the earth at ~4.5 billion years of age.
Many of the christians I converse with are a lot smarter than me and not one of them even begins to consider the possibility of the known age of the planet being out by 99.999%, which is what would be needed for the earth to be 6000 years old. To avoid that is to avoid thinking. Note that the age of the earth is neither an argument for god nor evolution, just a simple fact. It is certainly possible to use logic to arrive at the conclusion that god exists, but it's illogical to arrive at conclusions which are unsupported by any evidence whatsoever.
"New Age" practices. Astrology, psychics, crystal energy, auras and the like.
Well, the first giveaway should be in the attempt to label these practices as anything new. They have all been around for centuries, and most of them far longer than christianity. That they need to be constantly "renewed" is a direct guide to their effectiveness: zero. If anyone were truly psychic, or astrology really predicted events, practitioners of it would be feted worldwide as Messiahs. Instead, they appeal to a small sector of society, for whom mysticism is an essential part of life. There are a multitude of "challenges" worldwide for psychics or astrologers to complete which would earn them millions of dollars and worldwide acclaim. None have managed it so far and I strongly doubt that anyone ever will - people have claimed all sorts of mind-power over the centuries, but none have ever worked.
Politics is an area where thinking is more than a little helpful. I don't care which side you're on, vote for whoever is best for you, but don't take politicians at their words, check their history. If they've consistently supported a policy, it's fairly likely that that is their honest view. If a politician chops and changes his policies with public opinion, it's a good bet that he is going to be telling you what he thinks you want to hear, rather than what he really intends.
I'm a recruiter and I hear plenty of baloney in my line of work. Some employers will tell me of grand expansion plans, while actually doing no more than building castles in the sky, and candidates tell me of achievements which, in reality, they've sat on the sidelines and watched.
Remember, anyone can make an assertion, but only those in possession of facts can back it up with evidence.
