Mental Trappings

"consider a situation in which a father and his son are driving down the road. The car collides with a tree and the father is killed. The boy is rushed to the nearest hospital where he is prepared for emergency surgery. On entering the surgery suite, the surgeon says, "I can't operate on this boy. He's my son."
The apparent paradox is caused by a hasty generalization. The reader, upon seeing the word surgeon, applies a poll of their knowledge of surgeons (regardless of its depth) and reasons that since the majority of surgeons are male, the surgeon is a man, hence the contradiction: the father of the child, a man, was killed in the crash."

- Wikipedia

This is a common one, it goes around claiming to be "proof" that we're sexist and assume only men are surgeons. So sexist in fact, that even faced with the (supposed) choice of the surgeon either being a mother or the same man from the crash, we assume it's impossible.

But I don't think so. I think it's just a trick question. Assume if you can, that a person has a neutral view of the sexuality of most surgeons going into the story. Then faced with 4 sentences, altogether containing the words 'father' twice, 'son' twice, 'he' twice, and 'boy' twice. With no other sexuality mentioned. That's 8 references to males, and zero to women in 4 sentences. This trick can be used in many different ways, to subtly suggest that the wrong answer. If you've ever heard a person ask you "Say "10" ten times." You say it. "Ten, ten, ten, ten, ten, ten, ten, ten, ten, ten." You'll probably use your fingers to count (I'm psychic) and then the person asks "What's an aluminum can made out of?" Then more often than not, the response is "tin". The person is persuaded to the answer "tin" even though not only is the real answer obvious, it's GIVEN in the question! Are we then to assume, by the logic of those who claim sexism, that people who say "tin" thought in their minds all the aluminum cans they've seen and concluded objectively that most of them were made of tin? The truth is, you don't think the surgeon can't be the mother, you simply have been led into a mental trap of only male options.

I only posted this rant because I read this crap on Wikipedia in the article about paradoxes. It's bullshit. Wikipedia isn't hard fact, it's collective opinion. I would like to point out, the first time I heard this riddle, was in a game aptly called "Mind Trap". Then I saw it in "Tin Cup" where the woman asserts the men are sexist for thinking the surgeon was a man, and apparently that's what Wikipedia thinks too. That and people think aluminum cans are made of tin.

My Bad Japanese Teacher

Normally I wouldn't knock anyone. I might bitch about things, but I keep my shit talking to a minimum and usually don't begin conversations by trashing people. Caveats aside, I will be an asshole here and rip on my Japanese teacher.

The story begins about half an hour ago when I was reading Time's "50 best websites of 2008". One of the websites was "ratemyprofessors.com" which simply enough lets people bitch about their teachers. So I immediately thought of my Japanese teacher and looked her up. She was on there. She was on there for 2 colleges. And both colleges had 6 pages of negative comments from students. According to the website's boasting, there's an average of 8 comments per listed professor, my teacher had somewhere around 30 comments total, I don't know I lost count. Almost every comment was the same, the same issues I had with her. I'm not even sure if I should list the issues, because I'm sure no one who isn't actually in her class, or going to be, or is thinking about taking Japanese in Stockton would care at all. I'll just say she classically sucks. All the classiclly bad things a teacher could do to make sure a student not only hates the class, but fails or drops out and never takes it again, is her forte'.

I remember by mid term she was bragging about how many students had dropped out. She'd drop people out even when they were still there. She was about to drop me, just because she didn't see me behind someone one day. Not one thing I ever learned actually living in Japan helped me out in this Chinese woman's class.

Just amazed that whenever I'd say my Japanese teacher sucked, my family wouldn't believe me. Just checking out this site proves that my opinion is actually astoundingly on the mark for this website.

As a control I checked out some of my other teachers

Econ Teacher - negative shit storm. I didn't have much of an opinion of his teaching ability one way or the other beause I find his notes entirely useful and I had the highest grade in the class almost the whole time.

English Teacher - generally positive reviews. He was my favorite of the bunch even though he graded me like I was retarded. Definitely lost all hope in becoming a writer taking his class. If I can't impress everyone, then I'll impress no one. But I loved his spirit, he was smart and dove deep into the material.

So things seem to be about even. I imagine most people who go on that site do it to complain so it should be tough to get mostly positive reviews. Amazing how many Delta students have already been to that site.

Maybe online college isn't a bad way to go.