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		<header>
			<h1>Another day spent working on homework</h1>
			<p>Day 00590: Monday, 2016 October 17</p>
		</header>
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2016/10/17.jpg" alt="It&apos;s maple seeding season." class="weblog-header-image" width="811" height="480" />
<p>
	Current countdowns:
</p>
<ul>
	<li>0 days until my old domain registrar can no longer counter my charge dispute</li>
	<li>6 months worth of weblog entries to correct misuse of the <abbr title="Extensible Hypertext Markup Language">XHTML</abbr> <code>&lt;q/&gt;</code> tag in</li>
	<li>249 scheme-specific <abbr title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</abbr>-parsing classes to write and add to <a href="https://git.vola7ileiax4ueow.onion/y.st./include.d/releases">include.d</a></li>
</ul>
<p>
	I wrote to my university program advisor, as they still hadn&apos;t written back to me about the course registration issues.
	A couple hours later, sent a letter to student services about the same issue.
	Hopefully one of them will respond and be able to help before the course registration deadline arrives.
	If they don&apos;t write back by tomorrow, I should write back to both on the next day.
</p>
<p>
	I got to work on my <span title="Online Education Strategies">UNIV 1001</span> essay, the one in which I had to choose a conflict that I&apos;ve recently encountered, choose a critical thinking analysis tool presented this week, and use the tool to analyze the conflict.
	I am at an utter loss as to which tool will be most effective for analyzing the T-Mobile conflict, the only real conflict that I&apos;ve dealt with recently.
	As such, I&apos;m attempting to use all four, with each one providing ideas to help the flesh out the others.
	Depending on how well it goes, I might keep the best analysis or I might keep all four.
	I made great progress on that essay, but before I could finish, I remembered this week&apos;s discussion assignment.
	I should probably finish that as soon as possible, and by this point in the week, enough other students have usually responded to allow me to finish my responses to their responses.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
	I don&apos;t agree that science is a religion for several reasons.
	While I did discus the fact that some people try to discredit science using religion as their &quot;proof&quot;, it isn&apos;t all religious people that do that.
	Belief in one religion us usually mutually exclusive with belief in other religions, but when it comes to science, many people believe that religion tells us <strong>*who*</strong> set things in motion and <strong>*why*</strong>, as well as what will come later, while science instead answers the question of <strong>*how*</strong> things work.
	In other words, these people believe that their god or gods either built the laws that govern science or are bound by these laws.
</p>
<p>
	Additionally though, religion uses <strong>*inductive*</strong> reasoning.
	&quot;We see X happening; it must be caused by (one of) our god(s).&quot; Instead, science, by definition, uses <strong>*deductive*</strong> reasoning.
	Instead of trying to discern the absolute facts, it instead eliminates as many falsehoods as possible, leaving us with what are most likely facts.
	Instead of guessing that a god did it and assuming that we&apos;re right, science tests our guesses and attempts to disprove them.
	How would you even test the &quot;facts&quot; posed by religion? With science though, everything is meant to be challenged and potentially disproved.
</p>
<p>
	Like any set of practices and beliefs, science can be used for good or evil, and can be represented by good or evil people, but that doesn&apos;t make it a religion.
	Likewise, both science and religion can be used to try to back answers to questions of ethics, but the way that they&apos;re used to do so is extremely different.
	With religion, the argument is basically &quot;(one of) our god(s) disapprove(s) of this&quot;.
	For example, some gods seem to disapprove of homosexuality, but no actually reason why the gods even care is brought up.
	On the other hand, science tries to show us a cause-and-effect relationship that leads us to our own conclusions.
	For example, science tells us that the burning of fossil fuels is causing earth&apos;s climate to change drastically.
	Science tells us that this climate change is leading to the extinction of many spices, and will probably lead to our own extinction.
	Is our own extinction bad? Science doesn&apos;t even attempt to answer that question.
	Instead, we&apos;re left with the question ourselves of if we even care.
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
	I agree that many people believe things based on who told us.
	There&apos;s no time to check every fact about the world.
	Some people instead chose to believe what makes the most sense though, actually putting some thought in, even if they can&apos;t necessarily read all the evidence themselves.
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
	I used to be trained to be a sheep, yes.
	Over the past several years though, I&apos;ve been mostly thinking for myself though.
	I often end up in small disagreements over it.
	People think I damned for not believing in their god.
	People think I&apos;m a pain for refusing to install the proprietary, sourceless software that they want me to.
	Some people get aggravated with me for refusing to watch proprietary movies with them or refuse to listen to proprietary music.
	They sometimes try to tear down my ethical code, despite the fact that I don&apos;t push it on them.
	The existence of their ethical code forces me to question my own, but the reverse is true too.
	Because I don&apos;t do things the way that other people do, it causes them to have to question themselves as well, and they sometimes take that as a direct attack, even if I don&apos;t care if they follow a god and use, watch, and listen to proprietary software and media.
	I believe that I am a critical thinker, as I question everything.
	While many people take the presence of questions as a threat, I instead view the presence of questions as an chance to reevaluate my understanding of the world.
</p>
<p>
	A great example of this happened this week, actually.
	I&apos;ve been against the use of <abbr title="genetically modified organism">GMO</abbr>s for a while now.
	However, after doing some reading in my <span title="Globalization">POLS 1503</span> course, I&apos;ve had to reevaluate my opinion.
	I&apos;m still against the patent system, which is often used in combination with <abbr title="genetically modified organism">GMO</abbr> technology, but I couldn&apos;t find enough evidence to back the rest of my argument.
	I&apos;ve been forced to switch sides, deciding that <abbr title="genetically modified organism">GMO</abbr>s themselves, unlike the patents that cover them and the noxious pesticides that are often used with them, are not a threat.
</p>
<p>
	My argument with religion is just an example of my point.
	If you look at the method that people usually use to defend their religion, you can clearly see that these people are not critical thinkers.
	Some religious people <strong>*are*</strong> critical thinkers, but those people tend to use much less common arguments; arguments that actually make sense logically.
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
	Yeah, I know that sometimes, I don&apos;t understand the discussion questions even after completing the weekly reading assignments.
	I think that I understand most of the time, but some of them require clarification that isn&apos;t readily available.
	I also think that there&apos;s a difference between being wrong and failing to think critically.
	Sometimes, we just don&apos;t have all the required experience and information.
	Critical thinking allows us to adapt our thought processes and data pools, but we&apos;ll never have all the data and thought processes to deduce all answers correctly.
</p>
<p>
	I like how you were able to elaborate and touch on several issues with both prospective job candidates and employers.
	I don&apos;t think that my ideas on this assignment were nearly as crystallized as yours were.
</p>
<p>
	Alright, you said that if we asked later, you&apos;d prove that four minus one can equal five.
	I&apos;m curious to see how you&apos;d prove that.
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
	That&apos;s some very interesting information.
	I didn&apos;t realize that someone had quantified the amount of time needed to develop one&apos;s critical thinking.
	Assuming that it&apos;s true, colleges don&apos;t have enough time to teach critical thinking.
	This seems like one of many reasons that critical thinking should be taught, or at least begun to be taught, much earlier on than college.
</p>
<p>
	The phrase &quot;common sense&quot; means a lot of things to a lot of people.
	Personally, I don&apos;t find the phrase useful, as it&apos;s to vague to convey any real meaning.
	There have been many times when someone&apos;s been upset with me for not using &quot;common sense&quot;.
	Many of these times, I&apos;m able to walk the person through exactly why their &quot;common sense&quot; idea wouldn&apos;t work, making their personal version of &quot;common sense&quot; dead wrong.
	Almost every time that I can&apos;t outright prove their method wrong, I can prove that I didn&apos;t have the information that they just assumed that I would have, so I had no way to reasonably come to the same conclusion as them.
	Basically, the phrase &quot;common sense&quot; seems to be a stand-in for &quot;thing that I don&apos;t want to bother explaining the reasons behind because I want you to be a mind reader&quot;.
	At least, the people that use that phrase around me seem to use it that way, and they seem to use it both when speaking to me about what I&apos;ve done and speaking to me about what other people have done.
</p>
<p>
	Ha ha, I was actually going to comment myself about your having purchased a lottery ticket, but you already covered that.
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
	It&apos;s amazing how much productivity is expected these days.
	The economy is poor and unemployment rates are high.
	If you want to keep your job, you have no choice but to be unreasonably productive! After all, if you won&apos;t be unreasonably productive, they can find someone that&apos;s desperate enough that they will.
</p>
<p>
	Critical thinking involves being open to new ideas.
	If you&apos;re unable to hear out and evaluate the ideas of others, you&apos;re most certainly not a critical thinker.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
	With that out of the way, I got back to work on my <span title="Globalization">POLS 1503</span> essay on disease prevention and <abbr title="genetically modified organism">GMO</abbr>s from the other day.
	I figured that if I could finish this essay, I&apos;d have only the difficult essay left, and could focus solely on that.
	I didn&apos;t finish by the time I went to be though, and I&apos;m feeling very pressed for time.
	I made some bad decisions earlier in the week, and it&apos;s coming back to bite me now.
	When Alyssa and Cyrus came over, I waited longer than I should have to start my <span title="Globalization">POLS 1503</span> essay, thinking that Alyssa could provide some insight.
	When they didn&apos;t provide insight, I didn&apos;t really finish up the skeleton of my paper that day as I should have.
	I had all my notes from the reading assignment, but I only wrote about half of the paper.
	The next day, which was yesterday, I mostly took the day off, despite not having as much done as I should have.
	If I&apos;d finished up my <span title="Globalization">POLS 1503</span> paper yesterday or the day before, perhaps I could have finished my <span title="Online Education Strategies">UNIV 1001</span> essay today or maybe tomorrow.
	As-is, both papers will be a bit of a rush job.
</p>
<p>
	My <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> still sings the tune of freedom and transparency.
</p>
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