Three years ago, my mother was on the phone with her close friend from Seattle, and I remember overhearing this friend of hers ramble on about how dramatically her life has changed since going on the Nu Skin My Victory Weight Control Plan, and how my mother should do herself a favour and try it too. Being the sensible person that she is, my mother calmly told her that diet-control and exercise were more adequate slimming methods than a daily dosage of five multi-coloured diet pills, to which I responded with approval of her adeptness in reasoned judgement and controlling emotions. Having lost an aunt to cancer after she experimented with two different herbal diet teas, and knowing that 95% of all commercial diet regimens are unsuccessful in the long run, my mother and I both reasoned that while the short-term results may be emotionally appealing, these weight loss programs are costly, detrimental to one's health, and even potentially deadly.

The pair of us regarded our explanation as acceptable since it was based on past experiences and factual evidence; we came to a conclusion using logic and little emotion. In doing so, our assumption is that reason is superior to other ways of knowing. This raises several questions concerning the process of distinguishing between something that is true and something that is believed to be true: is reason alone sufficient? Are there cases where reason breaks down, and we come to conclusions that take incredible leaps in logic? How does emotion hinder or contribute to the discerning process? There are three ways to apply reason, entirely, not at all, or partially.

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In regard to one's Intelligence Quotient (IQ), the common assumption is that the higher the IQ, the further ahead one will get in the world. Chris Terman tried to prove so by testing 250,000 elementary and high school students in the California area with three rounds of rigorous IQ tests, and identified 1,470 children whose IQs ranged from 140 to 200, genius level by most standards (Gladwell 74). Over the years he tracked every aspect of his subjects' lives, and everyone expected that the "Termites", as they were called, would someday constitute the elite of American society. Terman's process was ...

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