Final Post!- Kayla Snell

I think one of the main things I will be taking with me from this class forward comes from the blog post "How can you believe this shit?" It's a question I have been asking for years and I won't stop asking the question after this class. Things that seem illogical to us make perfect sense to others, leaving us bewildered. It gets even worse when these differences in opinion are manifested not as opinions, but as fact that's either correct or incorrect and whoever yells the loudest is the winner. This happens whenever I hear about creationist theory of dinosaurs and humans existing at the same time (or dinosaurs never existing at all), my dad's adamant argument that we're not having global warming, but in fact global cooling, and even when discussing sugar addiction in this class, because frankly, I don't agree with it. The question is, how do we argue our case, or do we even try at all?

Since I worked on fad, or "science backed" diets so often this semester, I can focus on that for the remainder of this blog post. I remember just before presenting my team's background report on the topic, I was looking through the slides and rehearsing one last time before going up in front of the class. A classmate noticed my slide on the keto diet and commented on how someone in this very class absolutely adores that diet. That moment was a good reminder that the things I am presenting as fact are not something that everybody sees as such. I had assumed that everyone in this classroom, educated, in college, capable of critical thinking, had come to the same conclusion I had. Whoops. Even so, I still went up in front of the class and presented my thoughts, complete with a slide called, "Why the Keto Diet is a Terrible Idea."

The biggest takeaway from this class for me personally, is that people are not going to change their minds no matter how much of our logic we throw at them. As a result, I don't think a good approach to an argument is to get the other person to change their minds. It will be my job to think more critically, and if it is something I feel like I am right about, others will have to find out that I also am not easily swayed. After all, perhaps it's a good thing that people don't change their minds very easily, or they risk becoming gullible and falling into every trap that comes their way.