Over the past few years, I’ve been building a collection of cartoon examples of denial techniques. This uses a technique known as parallel argumentation – transplanting the fallacies in misinformation into parallel, analogous situations. These cartoons were used extensively through the Cranky Uncle vs. Climate Change book and adapted into quiz questions in the Cranky Uncle game. This post summarizes many of these cartoons and offers them in high-resolution PDF form – click on any of the cartoons to download the PDF.
Ad hominem
Ambiguity
Anecdote
Cherry picking
Fake experts
False balance
False choice
Oversimplification
Red herring
Single cause
Slothful induction
Andreas Schmittner
I’ve been trying to use the app on my iphone, but it doesn’t work.
First, it asked me to enter my email address, which I did, but I never received a sign in email.
But for some reason I could still lot in, but the only option I had there was to take a quiz, which didn’t work.
John Cook
If signing up by email, you do need to receive that sign-in email in order to authenticate your email – maybe it was being spam filtered. However, I did notice you’ve just signed up for a group code for your class – I will send you that shortly, it will allow you to access the game without email.
Anna
Thank you John. I will use those lovely cartoons in my physics lessons!
Stephen
I have logged in to the app and encountered the problem described above. Yes, I did log in using the link which I received in my inbox. Yes, I did log back out and log in using the unique code. The login process was a little odd; the link in the email opened a page in Safari which didn’t take me to the app (which was open at the time) when the loading graphic disappeared. I switched to the app, which presented me with a black screen for a while, then took me to a screen which showed me as being logged in as [email address].
stgeve
same problem. web or app system seems to be down.
John Cook
There are some login issues in a few cases – if anyone does have trouble logging into the game, instead login using the following group code: SKS
Jen Lemke
I’m a school librarian and I want to use this game with classes, however, some of the quizzes (those with pictures and 4 different rhetorical strategies to choose from) do not load properly in the browser. Is there any way to fix this or any kind of work around?
John Cook
I’m guessing that you’re playing the browser version of the game – in the current version, some of the quizzes do display badly in this version. We have a new version of the game coming out within a few weeks that resolves this issue but in the meantime, the way to fix it is to make the browser window less wide (so it approximates the shape of a smartphone).
Marie Leydon
Hi,
I am in Australia and have tried to use the browser version in the hopes of using it in the classroom. It gets a couple of questions in and then stops working?
Love the information and the game looks great.
Any help appreciated.
John Cook
This seems to be a bug that was introduced in the latest update to the game – at the end of any fallacy explanation, the game freezes so it’s impossible to progress to quiz questions. I’ve let the app developers know. Thanks for the alert!