Nick Byrd’s Blog

A 3-Paragraph Writing Assignment

Since 2018, I’ve been adapting a 3-paragraph writing assignment that I stole from John Roberts at Florida State University. In this post, I’ll explain the assignment, its requirements, my advice to students, and what I like about this assignment. You’re welcome to adapt this assignment for your own purposes, of course.

What Is This 3-Paragraph Writing Assignment?

Here are my instructions to students:

In paragraph 1, construct your best argument for one of the following claims: [fill in your own mutually exclusive claims here]. Do your best to follow the rules of argumentation. You can use this flowchart to iteratively identify and correct weaknesses in the argument until the argument seems to lack obvious weaknesses. (You can adapt an argument from the assigned reading. Appeal to unassigned resources at your own risk.)

In paragraph 2, construct the best objection to the argument from paragraph 1. Remember to use only one of the top three kinds disagreement from the hierarchy in the 4th of my writing tips.

In paragraph 3, construct your best counter-object to the objection from paragraph 1. After explaining the counter-objection, mention your final verdict: should we embrace the original conclusion from paragraph 1 or do paragraphs 2 and 3 suggest that we need to adapt it? If we need to adapt the opening conclusion, how exactly should we adapt it? A clear and concise final verdict could be as brief as one sentence.

What do I Require From Students?

  1. Writing style. Write in a way that smart people who have not taken our class will understand. For instance, don’t use jargon like ‘logically valid’ or ‘soundness’ without explaining the meaning of these terms for your reader. You can also just explain concepts (correctly) in ordinary language, without ever using jargon — I don’t need you to mention the technical terminology; I need you to prove that you understand it.
  2. Citations. You do not need to cite me or my lecture material. And you can complete this assignment without needing to cite anyone (unless you mention or use ideas of people from the assigned reading). If you quote or even paraphrase ideas from authors we have read about or from any other source, then you need to cite them. Use whatever citation protocol is common in your area of study (e.g., APA, MLA, etc.) and remember that a proper citation involves both an in-text citation—e.g., “So-and-so argues that … (Year, page[s])”—and a list of works cited at the end—e.g., “So-and-So. YEAR. “Title”. Journal/Book. City of Publisher: Publisher, pages.”
  3. Name placement. Write your name (and the names of those you worked with) in a place that I cannot see while reading or grading the paper (e.g., on the backside of the final page or else on an entirely separate final page).
  4. Teamwork. You can work together (in groups no more numerous than your in-class group) if you disclose the name[s] of people with whom you discussed your paper. (Your group’s papers should not be verbatim copies or even near verbatim copies; at most, they can agree with one another and share some language. So I don’t necessarily recommend writing together I merely recommend planning or revising together). You should feel no obligation to work with anyone; working together is entirely optional.

Advice For Students

A. Read the “Philosophy Writing Guidelines” at the end of the syllabus. (It contains not only the grading standards, but nearly a dozen tips.)

B. Read the “Feedback Shorthand” at the end of the syllabus (to learn about common mistakes to avoid).

C. Refer to your instructor’s comments on your prior writing assignments to learn from prior mistakes.

Why Do I Like The 3-Paragraph Writing Assignment?

  • Shorter papers, because there is a 3-paragraph limit (and I grade papers according to their clarity, cogency, and concision (in that order), this assignment tends to produce shorter papers. And shorter papers can be easier to grade (although students tell me they are definitely not easier to write). I also think concision remains an underrated skill.
  • Cognitive empathy. By forcing students to generate maximally cogent argumentation from at least two more or less opposing perspectives, I hope students practice charitable debate, where they have to generate the most compelling version of reasons against their own position in a debate.
  • Flexibility. I have used this topic in courses about Business, Ethics, Logic, Science, Technology, and more. So it’s basic structure seems flexible enough to use in an wide range of courses that tend to require writing assignments.

Upon Reflection, Ep. 15: A Two-Factor Explication Of ‘Reflection’

You may have heard me drone on and on about this thing called “reflective thinking”. We philosophers and cognitive scientists are preoccupied with it. However, the term ‘reflection’ is sometimes used in different ways by scholars. To unify, make sense of, and guide our research, I synthesized a unified account from hundreds of years of English language, from philosophers, and from cognitive science. The result is this paper.

In this episode, I’ll read the paper, which explains the two key features of ‘reflection’ and how we measure them. This two-factor account of reflective thinking has implications for theories of rationality, self-knowledge, and dual-process theories.

Continue reading Upon Reflection, Ep. 15: A Two-Factor Explication Of ‘Reflection’

Upon Reflection, Ep. 14: Analytic Atheism & Analytic Apostasy Across Cultures

You may have heard that atheists tend to score better on reflection tests than theists? But why do scientists find this “analytic atheism” correlation?

Many studies have attempted to answer this question. Of course, even the best studies had limitations. So Steve Stich, Justin Sytsma, and I developed better methods and studied over 70,000 people on 6 continents. What did we find?

Apostasy was key. Those who shed their religion since childhood were the most reflective. Lifelong atheists were not necessarily more reflective than theists. In other words, the analytic atheism correlation seems to be explained by analytic apostasy.

In this episode, I’ll explain the methods, results, and implications in our paper “Analytic Atheism & Analytic Apostasy Across Cultures” which will be published in Religious Studies.

Continue reading Upon Reflection, Ep. 14: Analytic Atheism & Analytic Apostasy Across Cultures

Upon Reflection, Ep. 13: Reflection-Philosophy Order Effects and Correlations Across Samples

Suppose you glance at a clock that, unbeknownst to you, is broken, showing the same time all day. Nonetheless, you happened to look at the clock precisely when it showed the correct time. So your belief about the time is correct. My question is this: did you know what time it is?

Perhaps you think that you did. After all, you formed a belief on the basis of a device that most people trust and the belief was true! What else would it mean to know something? Well, in academic philosophy, the orthodox answer to this kind of thought experiment is “no”.

People who perform better on tests of reflective thinking tend to report philosophers’ orthodox answer to this kind of thought experiment. And, if you’ve been following my research, you know that philosophers are particularly reflective thinkers. These correlations may make you wonder about causation. Does thinking reflectively cause people to accept philosophers’ orthodoxy? Or is it the other way around: does studying thought experiments like the broken clock case somehow result in people performing better on reflection tests?

In this episode, I’ll tell you about the experiment I ran to find out. The paper is titled “Reflection-Philosophy Order Effects and Correlations Across Samples” and has been accepted for publication in Analysis. The paper will also mention a bunch of other thought experiments, tests of reflective thinking, and measures of research participants’ data quality.

Continue reading Upon Reflection, Ep. 13: Reflection-Philosophy Order Effects and Correlations Across Samples

The Bat And Ball Problem 20 Years Later

In 2002, a chapter from Kahneman and Frederick mentioned “the bat and ball problem”.

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total.
The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?

By 2005, Frederick’s Cognitive Reflection Test paper added the lesser known Widgets and Lily Pad problems. In the intervening 20-ish years, each paper seems to have accrued over 5000 citations.

In 2023, Meyer and Frederick published a massive follow-up paper about the first problem: 59 studies, over 73,000 participants, and more pages of Appendixes than pages in the main article. As someone studying various reflection tests and interventions, I had to take a look right away. In this post, I list five initial takeaways and two things to like about the paper.

Continue reading The Bat And Ball Problem 20 Years Later

Oppenheimer: ‘Philosopher-Scientist-Statesman’

J. Robert Oppenheimer “was widely known not just for his scientific success but for his remarkably wide-ranging knowledge of the humanities [,…] an extraordinary combination…”, says Ashutosh Jogalekar in his 8th and final post about Oppie over at 3 Quarks Daily (2023). Why do I start with this quote? I think it alludes to an important lesson for our time. I explain in less than 700 words below.

Continue reading Oppenheimer: ‘Philosopher-Scientist-Statesman’

Upon Reflection, Ep. 12: Tell Us What You Really Think

I have a question for you: “If a bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total and the bat costs $1.00 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?“. Did 10 cents seem right? The authors of questions like this are attempting to lure you to accept this incorrect answer in order to test whether you thought reflectively when you solved the problem. However, there may be problems with this method of testing reflective thinking. So my colleagues used some underrated methods to determine the degree to which tests like this misclassify correct responses as reflective or lured responses as unreflective. I’ll read the paper in this episode.

Continue reading Upon Reflection, Ep. 12: Tell Us What You Really Think

Here’s to the Philosopher-Scientists!

Sometimes philosophers complain that scientists do philosophy badly and that philosophers may thereby be underrated. The idea is that people could have better philosophy if they just turned to academic philosophers rather than the popular scientists that have done philosophy badly. (Perhaps analogous complaints about philosophers circulate among scientists). In this post, I want to turn our attention to scientists that do philosophy well and philosophers that do science well.

Continue reading Here’s to the Philosopher-Scientists!

Upon Reflection, Ep. 11: Testing for Implicit Bias

In this episode, I read my short paper with Morgan Thompson in WIRES Cognitive Science titled, “Testing for Implicit Bias: Values, Psychometrics, and Science Communication“. You may have heard about implicit bias. It is measured by indirect rather than direct measures of bias. We reconstruct arguments from debates about these measures, reveal some instances of talking past one another, highlight how debate has changed, and highlight how the debate is laden with value judgments about psychometrics and science communication. As always, free preprints of my papers are available on my CV under “Publications”.

Continue reading Upon Reflection, Ep. 11: Testing for Implicit Bias

Upon Reflection, Ep. 10: Great Minds Do Not Think Alike

This time I read my 2022 paper in Review of Philosophy and Psychology titled, “Great Minds Do Not Think Alike: Philosophers’ Views Predicted by Reflection, Education, Personality, and Other Demographic Differences“. As the title suggests, various psychological factors predicted variance in philosophers’ answers to classic philosophical questions. This raises questions about how psychological and demographic differences can explain philosophical differences. There are also implications for scientific psychologists as well as academic philosophers.

Continue reading Upon Reflection, Ep. 10: Great Minds Do Not Think Alike